Composition: History & Theory: 1990 - 1999
“The Subject Is Discourse” by John Clifford
Description
In “The Subject is Discourse” John Clifford uses neo-Marxist theories to critique composition instruction. He argues “that the teaching of writing is inevitably an ideological act and thereby one part of any culture’s attempt to reproduce itself, both intellectually and economically, by creating accommodating students who are eager to fill designated positions of influence within various institutional landscapes” (382). For Clifford, because the teaching of writing is always part of a reproduction of the dominant culture’s ideology, writing pedagogies that attempt to teach writing removed from sociopolitical contexts recreate an oppressive ideology. The main object of his critique is the current pedagogy of the time as embodied by the field’s textbooks like the St. Martin’s Guide to Writing, which Clifford argues “creates the illusion that we can transcend ideology with three well-developed paragraphs of evidence, that we can somehow change the minds of others in a rhetorical vacuum freed from the pollutants of prior social alignments” (388–389). Clifford attempts to show that new process rhetorics, much like expressionist or traditional rhetoric, “unproblematically [assume] that the individual writer is free, beyond the contingencies of history and language, to be an authentic and unique consciousness” (388). In contrast to these pedagogical approaches, Clifford argues that as teachers of writing we should help “students to read and write and think in ways that both resist domination and exploitation and encourage self-consciousness about who they are and can be in the social world” (397).
Clifford, John. “The Subject is Discourse.” Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age. Ed. Patricia Harkin and John Schilb. New York: MLA, 1991. 38–51. Rpt. In Relations Locations Positions: Composition Theory for Writing Teachers. Ed. Peter Vandenberg, Sue Hum, and Jennifer Clary-Lemon. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 2006. 381–99. Print.
Date of Upload
11/03/09