A REINTERVIEW with Geoffrey Sirc, 2.

The PreText Conversations held a Re/In/View

with Geoffrey Sirc  about his  article published in P/T

during November, December, January of 1994-1995.

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Date:         Sun, 27 Nov 1994 10:09:21 -0600
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         "Victor J. Vitanza" 
Subject:      vjv->gs: shun ah! see?

Vjv->gs

Let's have some fun...

Let extremes meet...

Geoff, you say that you like potlatch (and potluck!), then, ...


[[[[What you are about to see has been reformatted so that
it will not fit on your monitor!  It is not a question but an
allegory.]]]]


Perhaps it would be good to situate (counter-pun intended)
what you are saying (suggesting) in your article.  Therefore, I
have been vvandering . . .

_____How  would you situate your work as put forth in "A&P"
 in relation to Mina Shaughnessy's _Errors and Expectations:
A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing_ (1977)?

This, indeed, is a tricky question! While you refer to Don Stewart
(tricky enuf, given relatively recent circumstances) and David
Bartholomae, you do not refer to Shaughnessy.

Sad enuf, I don't find many references to Shaughnessy any-
where, today. When I read in the area that I might expect to
find references to her, she is not there.  I do, however, find
references to her as an award.  A monument!  (And yet, tho
Shaughnessy is not mentioned, she *is* there, is she not!
Not?!

As ...

        Kundera (e.g., in _TheBook of Laughter and Forget-
        ting_ and _Immortality_)
        and
         Lyotard (e.g., _Heidegger and the "jews"_)

say, we, as a culture,

        REMEMBER IN ORDER TO FORGET.

Epideictic discourse seems to function in that way for us.
(Nicole Loraux, _The Invention of Athens_; D. Bartholomae,
"Inventing the University.")

And now, let us forget foucault.  (Und definitely Edipus, who
founded the uni-nonadversity!  What Ed remembered was not
worth remembering!)

There are somethings that I think positively @ forgetting.  There
definitely is, as Nietzsche says, an affirmative forgetting.  I, in-
deed, reassert here, as before, forget the uni-versity and multi-
versity.  No to them!  And recall the perversity!  Yes, to per-
versity.

There is everygoodreason to forget Athens, while remembering
how Heidegger forgot the "jews."

And yet, as JJ says: "Jewgreek is greekjew.  Extremes meet."

And yet, as Reb Derissa (Derrida) interrogates:

_____"Are we Jews?  Are we Greeks?  We live in the dif-
ference between the Jew and the Greek. . . .  We live in and
of difference, that is, in _hypocrisy_. . . .

        Are we Greeks?  Are we Jews?  But who, we?  Are
        we (not a chronological, but a pre-logical question)
        _first_ Jews or _first_ Greeks? And does the strange
        dialogue between the Jew and the Greek, peace itself,
        have the form of the absolute, speculative logic of
        Hegel, the living logic which _reconciles_ formal
        tautology and empirical heterology. . . ?  Or, on the
        contrary, does this peace have the form of infinite
        separation and of the unthinkable, unsayable trans-
        cendence of the other? To what horizon of peace does
        the language which asks this question belong?  From
        whence does it draw the energy of its questions?  Can
        it account for the historical _coupling_ of Judaism
        and Hellenism?  And what is the legitimacy, what is
        the meaning of the _copula_ in this proposition
        from perhaps the most Hegelian of modern novelists:
        "Jewgreek is greekjew.  Extremes meet"?
        ("Violence & Metaphysics" 1978, 153; Derrida's
        emphasis)


There is a terrible, dark paradox here:  remembering is forgetting.

I think that I would have myself forgotten the possible connec-
shun between Shaughnessy's work and your work here, if I had
not read an article in _The New Yorker_ entitled "Class Struggle"
by James Traub (Sept 19th, 1994: 76-90).  The article is about
Rudi Gedamke, who teaches at City College NY; about his
students who are going to fail.  In this article, there is no mention
of Shaughnessy.  It is a bitter--and I think misguided--article.
I think "misguided" because it neither remembers Shaughnessy
or thinks your (sircs's) alternative thoughts.  Or thinks any such
thing as Hope.

The author, Traub, ends the article:

        Rudi was a succinct man, and he summed up his view of
        the world as follows: 'The great problem with this society
        is that we don't give a shit about our children.  That's
        where theproblem lies.  And by the time they get up here
        it's too late. (90)

Let's forget our children. (Andyet, what is more mysterious than
our children?)

----->

Back to my question:

_____Geoff, vvhy have you forgotten Shaughnessy? (And yet,
haVe U?

Therefore,

_____Are we Shaughnesseans?  Are we Sirceans (siren-eans,
Circeans)?

_____Should we not live in the difference between the Shaugh-
nesseans and the Batilleans, Situationists, etcs. . . . ?
Should we not live in and of difference, that is, in _hypocrisy_.
. . ? (Should we not say NO [NOT!] to either ... or?)  After
all has been said and undone, are we not in and of the difference
betwin bread-alone theorists and stripwriters?

Now, I am vvell aware that for many of our bros/siss who art in
dogmatic marxism or in postmarxism, such thinking (i.e., being
in and of the difference) would be an acknowledgement of com-
plicity!  And yet, they think of surplus, excess, Xuberance ... NOT
at all.

-----

_____Geoff, why don't we forget the questions?!

... as Bataille suggests that Oedipus should have done when enter-
ing the city and being confronted by the sphinz ... I forgot your
question.


---Vjv
SOPHIST@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
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Date:         Mon, 28 Nov 1994 00:17:00 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      rs->gs: [recapitulation?]

Geoff, I really dig this sentence: "We strip from them [students] all the
honky-tonk elements they may have brought in with them from Main Street,
chastening them for their values in tones ranging from the patronizing to
the hostile."  (Apologies to any bibliophiles in our viewing audience.  No
page #'s available; I'm reading this off VV's file.)  And soon after:
"Ironically, it is in the name of authenticity that we rob them of their
native Main Street tongue."  We've seen this quite often, not just in the
texts you cite, but also in conversations with colleagues, probably even in
our own classrooms (that is, before we got cool).  And yes, this is no
doubt what unites in unholy matrimony the tight-assed conservative (anti)-
intellectual and the crusty liberal professor-type (I think some academics-in-
training look forward to this crustiness.  It's the university-as-a-refuge-to-
indulge-your-elitism-without-having-to-"come-out"-and-say-Rushisright
gambit for a comfortable career).

That said, however, a question arises that goes something like this:

_____When we speak of "honky tonk elements" and "native . . . tongue," and
we seem to find ourselves anthropologizing (read academicizing) things,
should we be concerned that we are perhaps copping the same unfortunate
riffs as our predecessors?

Which is not to bash anthropological models/tendencies/impulses/etc.
However, we see the limitations of this kind of gaze in the writings you
cite--clearly an us/them groove going on.  And I wonder to what extent we
can avoid that kind of violence no matter what we do theoretically,
pedagogically, or otherwise.  That is, to what extent can we not be the
voice of Institution?  I suppose I tend to think that, regardless of
how we may change that institution, it will remain Institution, and as such
it will continue to pose, simultaneously, a threat and a promise, by
virtue(?) of its Institution-ness, to the student, who at once submits
to and resists its imperatives.


_________________
Raul Sanchez, Jr.
USF--Tampa

 
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Date:         Mon, 28 Nov 1994 11:09:42 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      gs->vv: Mina Shaugnessy

_____Forget Shaughnessy?

It's interesting that you bring her up, interesting to think of her.  I hadn't
realized how close we were in many respects.  It is like we are the same scene,
but she is the print and I am the negative.  Or she is the form, and I am the
*informe*, if I can use that term.  (Krauss:  "let us think of *informe* as what
form itself creates . . . form producing a heterologic . . . not as the opposite
of form but as a possibility working at the heart of form, to erode it from
within . . . destabilizing the game in the very act of following the rules"
167).  I give students just enough so they don't disgrace themselves (and show
them how to get more if that's what they want), but I also show them how and why
they might want to undo it (I want, Victor, to forget the questions).  I don't
recall Shaugnessy on undoing.  Yes I want to remember to forget (not forget to
remember to forget, no Elvis citings); so remembering Coles, Macrorie, Lutz,
Deemer, et al. . . . to forget.

No, Victor, I would never forget Shaugnessy.  How could I?  Her voice is so
alive in most of 80's Composition.  She is a central figure in composition's
miracle cycle: "Nothing, it seemed, short of a miracle was going to turn such
students into writers" (3).  It's almost a zealotry, this desire to help the
inexperienced, the unlettered.  Shaugnessy offers field notes to other ardent,
dedicated types who want to Do Something Good.  Help them exercise "their right
to all the advantages of literacy" (as the dust jacket on her book says . . .
and just how, exactly, would we ennumerate all those advantages, I wonder?).  Of
course I value the parameters she broadened; I work within them and am grateful.
That was immensely valuable work, to loosen people's notions of error, to (try
to) deflect the insane demand for correctness.  She brought a tolerance and love
in thinking of our students.  I would never underestimate that.  And ultimately,
I think, we (MS & I) both feel that there is this horrible, tedious code they
unfortunately have to learn (she rolls her sleeves up and gets on with the
learning-activity; I am stuck on that horror).  Think of the Hirsch affinity, I
would say that points to where I am uneasy with Shaughnessy.  My focus for the
enterprise is ultimately different than hers.

Of course I am on the same page as she, often:  "On the problem of knowing when
one has given enough evidence to persuade an academic reader, the difficulties
are more subtle" (270).  My students have, at some point (at many points), to be
given some guerrilla training in the fast-and-dirty academic essay.  Shaughnessy
calls it "learn[ing] the courtesies of the essay form" (273).  They're paying
for this thing; some of them might actually welcome it (but I know for a fact
some don't).  And many times, sure, it is just a matter of more evidence.  But
there are those other "goals," which have nothing to do with those
forms--excitement, ideas, joy, possibilities, intensity.  She's a formalist, I'm
not.  She inflects or resolves the tension of the scene we are both in on skill
mastery.  She writes of Expectations.  But at the beggars' banquet, there are no
expectations.

I'll tell you where else she ultimately disappoints.  Her book is copyright
1977;  I can't imagine writing a book on composition theory in 1977 and not
mentioning the Sex Pistols quite often.  "Pretty Vacant," you know?  Or _Radio
Ethiopia_ (76) or Marvin Gaye (73), (or _Blood on the Tracks_ (74) or the guy I
think you mean every time you say JB or on and on . . . ).  (Just as I can't
imagine teaching a class in 1994 without Snoop Doggy Dogg.)  _Errors &
Expectations_ is to that degree less interesting for me.  Her bride panel is
missing.  There is no Milky Way.  She is more Malic Mould.

Geoff Sirc
 
==================================
Date:         Mon, 28 Nov 1994 18:58:01 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      gs->rs & cb:practice

_____(My) Institutional Practice

Collin and Raul both bring up practical/institutional issues.  If you don't
mind, I'd like to write this through my current project, another allegory of
composition, this one being art.  The relevant institution there being the
Gallery/Museum.  A chiasmus of art & architecture might allow us to focus on the
function of the Museum space.  Douglas Crimp speaks institutionally of the
museum: "those institutions that are the preconditions for and shape the
discourse of modernism . . . can be named at the outset: first, the museum;
then, art history" (_On the Museum's Ruins_ 108).  I think very much our field's
pedagogical is the curatorial; we teach connoisseurship: the way Richard
Rodriguez reads Richard Hoggart's _The Uses of Literacy_ becomes, for
Bartholomae & Petrosky, a "a way of reading we like to encourage in our
students" (3).  We all know connoisseurship is to authenticate, verify the
museum's holdings.  So they curate the portable permanent collection called
_Ways of Reading_.  One of the problems I see in this is how (as Allan Kaprow
says) "at root paintings, etc. could not possibly exist in their form up to the
present without the psychological and physical definition of space given to them
by Architecture," how the design of the gallery space "has always been a frame
or format too."  I would go back to that time in the history of composition when
people consciously reacted to those walls, located their artistic practices
outside of them.  Like dada, 60's/70's art became a "negative, a total refusal"
(Duchamp's words, on dada).  So, the Happenings, Earthworks, Assemblages,
Readymades, etc.  Interrogating conventions, interrupting passivity, blurring
distinctions.  To go back to formal essayist concerns after that moment, in both
art and the teaching of writing (eg, Deemer & Lutz, 2 very key articles for me),
seems unfair.  As Crimp says, it is like pretending that bronze-cast sculpture
and oil paintings are (once again) the norms after all that has gone down since.
If I read Raul right, there is the inevitable dynamic of the institution
(Museum) to fit even these abberant works into its scheme; again to quote Crimp,
the work gets "consigned to a history of the avant-garde now understood to be
finished" (150).  I would delay that history, return to those unconventional
practices.

Both in theory and practice I play out this recuperation, this rememberance.
Deemer, Coles, Lutz, Macrorie happened, they took place (not to mention Duchamp,
Cage, Bataille, et al.)--their work explains composition more fully for me.  I
don't want it lost.  I don't mind teaching my students that there are these
frames and formats; I can show them how to put together a passable oil painting
(admittedly, I would prefer it to be one like Duchamp's "Tu M'" where a
bottle-washing brush, a readymade, sticks right out from the canvas ready to
poke someone in the eye if they get too close).  I will satisfy the form to an
extent; but I will feed the heart more (ethical content, "to live is to
believe").  So in terms of practice for me, I would first question the
occasion(s) of the writing my students do; I want it parking-lot, I don't want
it too determined.  Let's all get together and talk about Malcolm X or rap music
or Allan Bloom.  Let's make a content base where it would be logical for
me--this particular student--to actually want to make a written contribution to
this dialogue, where it would really make sense for me to do this (I'm not
talking about the actual sense of the writing, just the occasion).  And
materially, I want the compositions to have their readymades, their bottle
brushes.  My students are free to draw on whatever in order to furnish that
"evidence" Shaughnessy speaks of.  For example, I have colleagues who warn their
students, when it's a question of a research paper, don't draw too much on
popular periodicals.  That's absurd; look at the Patricia Wiliams book cobbled
together out of NY Times stories.  So materially, Ice-T and cult pamphlets and
H. Rap Brown and Allan Bloom and Nine Inch Nails and Cornel West and LA gang
members form the mix. I control it only so far as to demonstrate the logic of
choosing interesting materials.

And there is our talk all throughout.  We talk a lot.  On the net, FTF.  So it's
mega-textural (Deemer's advice for a good comp class--discuss theology to Ray
Charles records).  My students really like being able to discuss stuff like rap
and race and date rape and why they're not as stupid as Bloom says they are and
why they don't have to learn the stuff Hirsch says they do. Very much, I would
claim Oprah-style shows as a valuable rhetorical site.  And so, as talk-
transcripts, interviews become a very valuable textual material in my class.
The interview is a very important form, in terms of the register of the lexicon
and the self-organizing form of the text.  I give a lot of attention to
alternative forms like interviews and rap lyrics and Malcolm's speeches, finding
where the heart is in them, and where the aesthetically interesting moments are.
Also, if we have a pedagogy of writing as readymade, citation-as-evidence, then
I am not going to put so much emphasis on my student as producer, fabricator,
but more as chooser.  That's a place where Bartholomae is right--it's reading
that we can teach best, I spend time on writing, certainly, but mainly as
subversive survival skill.  To use Duchamp, again--I am far more interested in
the conceptual or idea side of things than the formal, visual, retinal side of
things.  Shaughnessy, then, for me would be too much focused on the retinal.
Also, I have my students generate at least half of the "readings" (videos,
articles, songs, T-shirts, whatever) we look at.  And MUCH in-formal writing.  I
am not speaking as an outsider, Raul, when I talk of honky-tonk elements.  I
have mine and cherish them and draw on them.  I am still striving, as a writer,
to unlearn the forms that are too virally there in me.  I want to spend as
little time letting my students get rewritten by them.  (Again, those that do; I
respect that impulse and show them how.)  What I do practically is small, minor;
I am still feeling my way, pressing against walls.  But it is a beginning, "got
to turn it around" (Husker Du reference there)

Raul notes an us/them groove.  I'm not sure how much I care to get around that.
I'm one of those "2 kindsa people" people.  I hear a fellow senator at the
faculty senate talking about raising the GPA and further gentrifying my
university, so they can "have the kind of student we all want to teach."  He is
Them.  I am not of him, even though we work in the same place.  I have got to be
the *informe* (Bataille uses things like spittle and crushed worms to define it)
to undo that form.  There is an interesting passage in one of Dan Garaham's
writings where he speaks out against Duchamp and the readymade, which subverts
nothing in his (mis)reading: "[I]nstead of reducing gallery objects to the
common level of the everyday object, this ironic gesture simply extended the
reach of the gallery exhibition's territory" (xix).  I know it can seem that
way; this past summer my son and I were in the Toronto museum, and I had the
powerfully unpleasant experience of seeing a Daniel Buren on the wall (if you
know his anti-museum work, you will know the sad, thudding irony I felt; it was
like watching a world collapse).  It was tempting to think, Damn, the Museum
wins again, like it always will.  But I don't think that at all.  I also, for
example, had the most amazing experience of seeing a Bruce Nauman retrospective
at the Walker last spring, and let me tell you, the museum may think it knows
what it's doing, fitting Nauman into its history of the avant-garde, but it has
no idea the power of Nauman as *informe*.  Spittle and crushed worm (or
fingernail clippings, like Kiefer uses), I'm sure, would have been more pleasant
compared to the awe-ful materials he uses (a clown's painfuly loud, incessant,
tortured screams; your view inside the grave; corpses with erections).  At
practically every turn, with every piece, Nauman was changing, unravelling, the
people who passed through those galleries.

Collin quotes the review of Bob Mould, talking about building random walls of
noise.  Erecting walls, that's what I resist.  Here's Documenta's director, Rudi
Fuchs, and he sounds pleased: "the artistic director builds walls--permanent
now, since there will be no return to that time when temporary structures would
suffice or even be preferrable to meet the unconventional demands of
unconventional art practices--and in the meantime the artists apply themselves
to the creation of works of art appropriate to this hallowed setting" (Crimp
241).  I'll take random walls of noise if I have to have walls.  I'd prefer no
walls.  Sure, there is the institution, the Museum.  But Crimp reminds us it's
in ruins now.  I am far more interested in the other Museum, Malraux's *musee
imaginaire*, the museum-without-walls (i.e., his project to mechanically
reproduce every work of art possible).  De Duve: "And the paradigm of the
readymade, up to now formal, begins to reveal its historical purport and its
ethical content.  It states the enunciative conditions of art "in the age of
mechanical reproduction," once the copy precedes the original, once the
museum-without-walls is first and the real museum second . . . If Manet
inaugurates modernism by the fact that he paints for the museum, then Duchamp
ends it because he understands that the real museum comes second in relation to
the museum-without-walls, for which it is nothing any longer but the referent,
the way the gold lying in the vaults of central banks is nothing but the
symbolic guarantee for the money in circulation.  The artistic patrimony of the
world has nothing in common but the statement "This is a work of art"" (90).  I
want to move to that second museuem, to undo connoisseurship around the
enunciative paradigm: this is writing.  It would be nice, I think, if our verbal
patrimony (yes! I choke on the word!) had *nothing in common* but that
statement.

Geoff Sirc
 
=============================================
Date:         Tue, 29 Nov 1994 16:45:46 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      lak-->gs: black and white?

Several questions here that are based on a combination of my reading, and my
familiarity with you (Geoff, down the hall and to the right, second door on
left...):

You imply that mainstream pedagogy "raze[s] the student landscape, until it is
as flat as Bloom's "clean slate... (33)"

_____Is it _really_ that black and white?  I think there's a fairly sound middle
ground there, and that's what we need to hit... more on this in a moment, after
the other questions.

Let's say we adopt your notion of composition.

_____What happens to our students when they get out of this space, where it's
okay to bring in this "new" writing, when they arrive in the course of someone
whose ides of what "good writing" is are as dull and dry as the ones you
criticize?  What happens, particularly, to institutions like our own (the U of
MN's) General College, whose mission is to transfer students to other academic
units within the University?

_____Are we shooting ourselves in the collective
feet -- or, more importantly, our students' feet?  In other words,

_____Is it truly "empowering" (a word I hate) to allow the kinds of students who
come through places like ours  this space, when it's possible that what they
take from it may not serve them well in the larger space that they'll ultimately
need to inhabit?  I don't mean this to sound like an accusation -- I'm truly
curious.  (I think you began to touch on this in your answer to VV's questions
re: Mina Shaughnessy, but more on this balance!)

--These questions, of course, raise other ones about the role of composition in
the academy.  Yes, my question implies that it's a service course.  Yes, that's
a controversial assumption, but above all else I'm a pragmatist, and I think I
recognize which side my bread is buttered on.  Another, related question:

_____Is there, in fact, a critique not just of composition here, but of the
larger system?  It seems to me that there is... but what happens before that
revolution comes to pass (ha!)?  You say that "no one from the Strip could take
a topic like that "creative/creativity" one seriously (42)" -- I agree.
_____But isn't meeting the expectations of this completely artificial prompt, in
part, what some students' futures depend on?


Linda Adler-Kassner
General College
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN  55455
612/625-6383
kassn001@maroon.tc.umn.edu

 
===============================================
Date:         Wed, 30 Nov 1994 00:02:33 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      rs->lak->gs: black and white?

As per VV's suggestion that we "engage in responding to and questioning and
answering each other," I'd like to address some of Linda's comments.

On the issue of composition being a "service course," and all the
negative energy that accompanies that label: It would appear that
composition IS a service course, a service discipline, in perhaps two ways,
both of which hover about this discussion.  First, it performs its
traditional "service" of preparing students to talk the academy's (or a
particular profession's) talk--composition as suckboy to the Real
Disciplines.  Clearly, many of us are uncomfortable with this although,
like Linda, we might grudgingly acknowledge its necessity; furthermore, we
might feel like we're shortchanging our students if we don't teach them how to
bake this kind of bread.

Second, composition, as perhaps Geoff (and I, despite my cynical
inclinations, which I won't dignify them by calling pragmatist, and maybe
others) see it, does, in a way, perform a service by allowing for the
possibility of "an absolutely new process" wherein "universality is subverted
by an action within a limited, circumscribed sphere, one that is very
concentrated, very dense, one that is exhausted by its own revolution" (JB in
Sirc).

One thorny problem with expressivist and cultural criticism type
visions of composition is that they deep-down believe in the Revolution,
whether it be individually or en masse.  I think our (or at least my)
students are far too ironic to go for that; in this sense, as Lester Faigley
has pointed out in _Fragments_, they have a Baudrillard-like vision of the
world.  I think I see Geoff's as an attempt to articulate a post-
Revolutionary model of doing stuff while dealing with that ironic monkey that
won't get off your back.  Embrace the monkey, touch the monkey.


"More happy love! more happy, happy love!"
Raul Sanchez, Jr.
USF--Tampa
 
==============================================
Date:         Wed, 30 Nov 1994 00:11:12 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      jdh->gs: [parking lot?, strip?]


I was going to ask similar questions, but do so through extending your
analogy of the parking lot into an allegory:  I have lived most of my life
in southern California, a place which apparently lives according to physical
laws of an alternative universe dedicated to the accretion of as many
minimalls as possible in as little an area as possibl  And, while I
appreciate Geoff's impetus (one which I share in my own teaching practices),
I wonder this:  
____________Do we really want to live next door to a parking
lot?

Developing a peadogy which engages studeniinventional strategies drawing
from their own experiences and worldviews is a tremendously important
starting point, but perhaps they also need to be taught more.  The Strip is
not the totality of architectural expression; there are other alternatives
(even if we want to discard as so much elitism the deadeningly boring Greek
Temple facades of museums and banks, the utilitarian fascism of modern
skyscrapers, etc.).  Perhaps it is just as vital that we teach them of the
spaces with which they are unfamiliar, but with which their familiarity will
be a matter of survival (at least).

Of course, while I write all this I plan to hop in my car and head to a 7
Eleven.

Void Boy
Graduate Theological Union
San Francisco, CA
--
 
==============================================
Date:         Wed, 30 Nov 1994 16:32:55 -0400
Sender:       "Re/Inter/Views (a Pre/Text cycle)" 
From:         PreText@MIAVX1.BITNET
Subject:      lak-->rs re:gs/b&w

Ah, yes.  Raul.  You've summarized the dilemma exactly... how to touch that
monkey without becoming a servant of the kind of academic drudgery that Geoff
writes against in his article.  I love some of the ideas here (in the article,
that is) as I know they work in Geoff's (your) class, but I'm constantly torn
about finding that "delicate balance."  How to blend this?  I think Geoff does a
better job than anyone I've seen, but I'm still uncomfortable with some of the
strategies in A&P because, as I said in my earlier comments, I wonder whether
they're critiques of the system, rather than just of composition, and how well
they might serve our students elsewhere in academe.

Linda Adler-Kassner
General College
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN  55455
612/625-6383
kassn001@maroon.tc.umn.edu
 

 
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