Charles I. Schuster UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN AT MILWAUKEE

Let's begin with what I think is a general assumption in and out of our discipline--one that I favor but which I hope to complicate as I proceed through this essay--namely, that English compositionis essentially defined in terms of practice rather than theory. After all, English compositionis grounded in practice, in the ways that oral and written language are produced, reproduced, learned, taught, shaped, modified-that is, in the variety of practices that anchor rhetoric and composition within our classrooms and our cultures. Students of literature and literary criticism (or most any other discipline, for that matter) may enter into a professional life giving little thought to pedagogy; their interests might center on research or hermeneutics or textual scholarship. They may actually be poor teachers, classroom catastrophes, and not only survive but flourish in their respective departments. In composition studies, so the argument goes, the demands are different. We must first and foremost be teachers. Our disciplinary identities are grounded in practice, in developing writing abilities. When we teach poorly, our ethos is undercut; our authority as specialists in/of writing collapses because we define ourselves and are defined by our colleagues as practitioners. All English compositionspecialists are essential Cartesians: we teach; therefore we are.

This identification of English compositionwith teaching composition (although teaching is only one form of practice) carries with it considerable ideological freight. Certainly our commitment to the classroom makes us useful to the university community. Composition faculty often have extensive ties with faculty and administrators throughout the university as well as high school English teachers and others in the community interested in promoting literacy. In addition to serving as directors of composition programs and writing centers, we often can be found on teaching improvement councils, campus computer committees, task forces charged with responsibilities for testing and assessment. We work with advisers, registrars, deans, faculty ombudspersons, and academic staff on a wide range of issues and problems: minority recruitment and retention, English as a Second Language policies, learning disabilities--the list is nearly endless. When the administration wants someone to serve in a teaching-centered, practical capacity, faculty in English compositionare often the first to be asked.

Our professional and personal commitment to teaching has other effects. We certainly perceive ourselves as creating knowledge and increased ability among our students, but we also believe that teaching is of great value in our own research and scholarship. After all, teaching is a way of testing the shadowy edges, traveling through unfamiliar territory. Virtually every essay that I have ever written, every project undertaken and completed, for example, can be traced back to the classroom. Whether teaching a fast-semester freshman composition course or a graduate seminar, I try to situate that course on the threshold between what I know and what I'd like to discover. To teach is to enter into a series of analyses, investigations, and conversations that lead toward consolidating knowledge, writing, and publishing.

As academics and as advocates of intellectual engagement, most of us possess the desire to maintain our culture and traditions, to invoke ourselves through our students and our written tradition. Through our classrooms and our colloquies, our presentations and published papers, we try to ensure that students and readers will sustain our ideas and values through successive generations. We practice our discipline to insure its survival; we express our normative notions so that they will continue to be invoked. The enabling means by which this is accomplished is modeling, teaching, writing--those activities commonly lumped under the rubric of practice.

In a way unique among disciplines, those of us who participate in English compositionconstantly enact our practice. I am referring here to our habits of writing, the rigors and rituals of our composing processes. There is a self-reflexiveness among us, potentially dangerous because it can lead to a strangulating self-consciousness. In practicing what we preach about free writing, drafting, collaborative problem solving, we become aware of ourselves as writers, engage in an unceasing protocol analysis of our own composing strategies. Our pedagogy is thus inescapable: we cannot seal it off from our scholarly enterprise. Even when we are immersed in our most inscrutable intellectual projects, we are teaching ourselves how to teach our students, implicating our pedagogy and our research by our own example. We are both the subject and the object of our disciplinary practice.

It certainly seems to be the case, therefore, that "practice" is a foundational principle of our discipline. We often read ourselves that way in our various discursive practices--that is, in departmental meetings, national conferences, published research, and scholarship. And so are we perceived by most faculty, who conceive of us as bound and embedded in practice in terms of what we teach, what we profess, what we enact as a discipline. Such a reading of English compositionsubordinates theory and projects us primarily as an applied discipline. According to this disciplinary definition of ourselves, theory is suspect--and conceivably dangerous--because it often has no direct bearing on our institutional regimen. Theory in some sense subverts; it invites confusion, possibly paralysis. Our discipline is thus identified with undergraduate instruction, with freshman writing, with serving the needs of university and community. The rest of our departmental colleagues may hate it, but we can exult when the English Department is referred to as the "Service" Department, for we subscribe to the fundamental notion of helping students to become better writers, whatever discourse community they claim as theirs. To say that English compositionis founded primarily in the notion of "practice" is, according to this line of argument, virtually to state an oxymoron.

So goes, at least, the argument.

Fifteen years ago, I taught my first rhetoric class. It was indeed a rhetoric class, not a composition class, for it required an emphasis not just on writing, but also on reading, speaking, and listening in supposedly equal parts. This was (and remains) the University of Iowa model, and I am still much in its debt. Given my English major background, I certainly placed more of my emphasis on writing; given the post-1960s atmosphere, I created what I hoped was an exciting and innovative curriculum to stimulate student interest. We read polemical essays by Camus, Malcolm X, Jerry Farber, H. Rap Brown with a special emphasis on student rights and civil rights. We listened to Lenny Bruce, wrote editorials on the ways that print and visual media distorted and subverted that odd quantity known as reality, held in-class debates on grading and the uselessness of college requirements. Given my endof-semester evaluations and my own perceptions, the students for the most part loved the course.

The problem was that at the end of fifteen weeks they were no better writers than they were in Week 1, before they listened to Simon and Garfunkel, read about the holocaust, argued through Eldridge Cleaver and Betty Friedan. My students liked me well enough and enjoyed the activities I legislated for them. Unfortunately, even though they did a truckload of essay reading, essay writing, speaking, and listening, none of the activities produced discernible improvement.

Previous to this stint of teaching rhetoric, I had been one of those "lucky" teaching assistants who had worked exclusively in the aerie reaches of the literature curriculum. I had spent three contented years teaching the sophomore lit survey without worrying about writing. Furthermore, I knew by dint of examination and discussion that my students had indeed improved in their understanding and appreciation of literary genres. Given my positive experience, I felt positive about myself as a teacher, and I knew that teaching would make a difference. So I signed up to teach rhetoric a second semester--now that I had learned from my mistakes.

Second semester, I taught differently. I used a different reader and a different writing text. I dropped one thematic focus in favor of another. I kept my most productive assignments and stole others from my fellow teaching assistants who claimed that they came with a 100% guaranteed success rate. That second semester of teaching rhetoric was even more successful than my first. This time I really knew what I was doing. The only problem was that at the end of the term, my students wrote no better than they had during the first week of the term.

Because I failed at teaching writing, I began a graduate concentration in composition studies.

At the time I thought that I might solve my problem several ways. First, I could use as a pedagogical model the composition classes I had taken as a college freshman. Unfortunately I already had. For they had consisted of reading published essays (in a thick anthology aptly titled Toward a Liberal Education) and then writing dull essays in response-or, during the second quarter of instruction, reading literature ( Lord Jim is the only text I remember) and then writing dull essays in response. I can guess what those essays were about, though none has survived:

"Should all students be required to graduate high school?"

"What is a liberal education?"

"Is Lord Jim a hero or a villain?"

"What is a liberal education?"

In my own fashion as a first-time instructor of Rhetoric 101, I had imitated my own education. The texts may have had different titles, but the pedagogy proved identical.

Other alternatives for improving my teaching were also available, most obviously learning some sure-fire teacherly techniques. One of the texts recommended to all new rhetoric instructors was Wilbert J. McKeachie's justly famous Teaching Tips: A Guidebook for the Beginning College Teacher, now in its eighth edition. I looked briefly at the book then and have since revisited it. McKeachie is a master of practice: his pedagogical strategies and suggestions take on the patina of 300year-old English walnut. Revisiting this latest edition, I can still see the book's merits. In his chapter "Organizing Effective Discussions," for example, McKeachie develops a taxonomy based on aims and modes. He offers advice on leading discussions, the use of questions and controversy, buzz groups, inner circles. His advice is invariably practical and always even tempered. "How Can You Have a Discussion if the Students Haven't Read the Assignment?" he asks in a subtitle, and then offers his answer: summarize the material, allow time for students to scan the material, institute quizzes, discuss the problem with the students. Sound advice which I have followed on numerous occasions. And he concludes his chapter by stating quite rightly:

In general, if the instructor is enthusiastic, friendly, and obviously interested in the subject, students also will be. Let me emphasize again that both lecture and discussion may have advantages at certain points in a course. Skillful teachers will choose the method best adapted to their objectives rather than rigidly sticking to one method only. (43)

What we have here is the promulgation of the golden mean, bent to the aims of pedagogy.

Unfortunately, McKeachie devotes only one chapter to teaching composition, chapter 10. It is entitled: "Term Papers and Teaching Writing" and contains the following subheadings: "Term Papers, Student Reports, Syndicate Methods, The Student Log, Correcting Papers, Giving Feedback, and Teaching Writing." As usual, his advice is judicious and balanced, even Johnsonian in its use of parallelism. He makes useful suggestions about maintaining student logs (or journals) and some fine if limited suggestions about grading and feedback such as "a global grade is more reliable than partial grades, but to help students to learn to write and think, grades are of little value. Students need more information about criteria" (132).

With a bit of effort, I could read through all of McKeachie and learn dozens, hundreds of thoughtful, useful, 5-year/50,000-mile-guaranteed teaching tips. Overall, they all could be summarized generally as follows: Be flexible, Be aware, Be humane, perhaps above all, Be practical. McKeachie is the essence of practice, the best example I know of teaching divorced from theory. His is a Time/Life approach to the classroom, a handy guide in this case not to wiring or plumbing but to lecturing and discussing. Like the grammar handbooks we assign so frequently and to so little effect, McKeachie's approach is best used by someone with a good bit of knowledge and considerable motivation. Had I consulted McKeachie extensively and adopted as my own his relentless emphasis on strategy rather than conception, my failure as a teacher would have been assured. I might have developed some dazzling techniques, but they would have served no substantive purpose, or-more dangerous yet--they would have made me a winsome instructor with little or no substance. I would not have been forced to develop that essential habit of tautologic thinking, intellectual self-reflexiveness. Teaching Tips is a book I still occasionally recommend, but only to experienced instructors who already possess the habit of thinking about their thinking and now wish further to hone their classroom skills. New instructors fed on a concentrated diet of methodology tend to lose their bearings, or rather, they tend to know where they are but not how they got there or where they are headed.

What I am articulating here is the problem of practice divorced from theory, practice unaware of its own implications. Although I remain sensitive to the claim that English compositionis grounded in practice, that term "practice" needs to be reconceived. Practice in our discipline, for example, should exclude drill, workbook, and other forms of pseudo-composing. It should exclude formulaic responses, be they fiveparagraph themes or fifteen-page research essays. It should exclude that whole range of so-called practices that corrode the composition classroom: extensive lecturing about grammar and punctuation, assigning writing as a form of punishment, placing a premium on usage and correctness in the early stages of composing, refusing to engage students in genuine spoken and written conversation, reifying a monolithic (and often linear) composing process to which all students must adhere, creating a pinball-style classroom that careens madly from one clanging thematic focus to another so that no sustained intellectual engagement is possible. Such "practices," destructive to students and teachers, run counter to the major currents within composition studies.When we associate English compositionwith a narrow, anti-theoretical view of practice, we are faced with a major problem: how do we choose among competing practices? As I plan for my first-semester composition course, for example, I compose a potential menu of pedagogical strategies. They include:

Additionally, I have to think my way through the kinds of class activities I will foster, my own relation to the students, the kinds of written responses I will make on essays, the criteria I will apply for evaluation, whether I will require a portfolio of written essays, how I will address the various needs--and developmental levels--of my students. On a more global level, I will have to consider overall goals of the course, its relation to other courses in the freshman writing sequence, its institutional purpose--as well as my own purpose in teaching it. The picture gets even more complicated if I am a beginning instructor, relatively powerless, unsure of the implications of my choices, and required to use a departmentally legislated rhetoric textbook and handbook. How am I to survive such teaching, let alone flourish? How am I to make informed choices, particularly when one approach (say sequenced writing assignments) undercuts another (writing groups), when my desire to get my students to invest themselves in their writing seemingly clashes with my obligation to teach them how to survive in the academy? Finally, how do I connect this teaching to my other graduate studies--to the work I am doing in the history of rhetoric, rhetorical theory, literary studies, research methodologies? How do I make of English compositionan integrative discipline that allows me to bring to bear what I am, what I know, what I think?

There is a strong tendency currently among English graduate programs to offer theory as the necessary antidote to practice, as if practice is the problem and theory its solution. That is, if concentration on practice leads to a skills-centered, mechanistic approach to composition studies--to a potential confusion over aims and modes--perhaps immersion in theory will provide a corrective. Certainly, theory is the darling of much post-baccalaureate English. Courses in Deconstruction, Marxism, Feminism, the Prague School, Post-Structuralist Critique, and New Historicism have to a large extent displaced literature courses in the graduate curriculum; at the undergraduate level, the effect is felt all the way to the freshman sequence. It is not unusual now for freshmen enrolled in composition and humanities courses to read selections by Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Adrienne Rich, Roland Barthes, Helene Cixous. Such an emphasis is understandable: all of us tend to teach what we know, what we find valuable and productive.

The books and journals in English compositiontestify to the fundamental importance of theorizing our practice. College English devotes entire issues to the post-structuralist debate; in College Composition and Communication, we find the leading scholars in our field situating their work within Marxist, Feminist, Derridean, Burkean, Rortian, Althusserian, and Foucaultian contexts. Even our parent organization, the National Council of Teachers of English, long noted for its commitment to curricular issues and K-12 school practice, has recently instituted a "Teacher's Introduction Series" with the publication of Sharon Crowley's excellent A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction. Worth remembering is that English compositionpossesses a substantial theoretical tradition, beginning with Greek thought in the fifth century B.C., which analyzed the power and effect of language, particularly in the domains of the juridical and legislative. The expansive contours of this tradition--its richness, diversity, and heterogeneity--are mapped out in Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg recent collection, TheRhetorical Tradition Rhetorical Tradition. Included in this are the likely figures one would, expect to find in such an anthology: Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, George Campbell, Hugh Blair, Richard Whately, Kenneth Burke, Chaim Perelman. What makes the book richer and more invigorating, however, are the less common, more startling inclusions: Gorgias, Boethius, Erasmus, John Locke, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mikhail Bakhtin, Stephen Toulmin, Michel Foucault, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva. That is, Bizzell and Herzberg are arguing in The Rhetorical Tradition that theory in English compositionis multidisciplinary, catholic in its inclusiveness, concerned with a wide variety of language practices and possibilities.

To read the work of such theorists--and those many others who must necessarily be excluded from any anthology--is essential for anyone concerned with composition studies. The theorists who compose what can be loosely characterized as the rhetorical tradition analyze, describe, explain, and problematize language use in all its varieties, including what we now call the "literary." They attempt to articulate the unfolding implications of that mysterious quantity known as the textual event. As an intellectual enterprise, theory encourages us toward selfreflexiveness. Its universalizing tendency leads us to generalize and synthesize; its abstracting tendency leads us to complicate and even subvert accepted points of view. Theory sets itself against the normative; its thrust is almost always to defamiliarize what we think we know, to compel us to reconsider what we assume that we no longer have to think about.

This is not to say that theory is of universal benefit, or that all theory is useful. Just as there is a variety of competing practices, so is there an extraordinary range of theoretical assumptions and arguments. To read the carefully delineated, taxonomic analyses of Aristotle is much different from reading the elusive, narrative explorations of Plato's dialogues. The search for theory, like the search for practice, entails experimentation and risk. To locate an appropriate theorist is to find someone who possesses similar epistemological assumptions, someone whose analytic method is reasonably congruent with your own.

Moreover theory, at least within composition studies, is inevitably context-bound, concerned as it is with audience, purpose, persuasion, argumentation, aims, affects, and effects. It analyzes language within a matrix of production and dissemination: thus our interests in discourse communities, reader response, Marxism, speech acts. Thus our equivalent concern with administration, freshman composition, the teaching of writing, textbooks, peer tutoring, collaborative learning, high school curricula. Given the contextual nature of our discipline and its emphasis on production and dissemination, it should not be surprising that we find ourselves drawn to an extensive array of disciplines and theorists, from anthropology, psychometrics, and physiology to Clifford Geertz, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Raymond Williams. For us, these are all rhetorical disciplines and rhetorical theorists to the extent that they examine the production and dissemination of written language within culture. The contextual nature of our discipline in some sense keeps us anchored to the world: like Antaeus, we preserve a certain strength by remaining in touch with the ground, forever conscious of the pull of gravity.

So far, my argument may seem to place "theory" in oppositional tension to "practice," but such a distinction is illusory. The two terms are vexed; they delineate extremist perceptions, caricatures. The opposite of "theory" is not "practice" but rather "thoughtlessness" or even "mindlessness." Theory is not opposed to practice; it is opposed to muddled thought, to confusion. Similarly, the antonym of "practice" is not "theory" but rather laziness, inertia, lack of accomplishment. The "theory/practice" dichotomy is, therefore, a false one. When people argue that "practice" is concrete, specific, tangible and that "theory" is abstract, general, conceptual, they are speaking to an assumed difference that disappears upon closer inspection. The cliché that "theorists think while practitioners do" corresponds to extremist positions that have little bearing on the work most of us accomplish in our professional lives. On the contrary, practice and theory are inseparable, indivisible. Every move made in the classroom is grounded in theory. Every speculative assumption, every theoretical argument no matter how seemingly removed from reading and writing as observed among actual individuals is grounded in practice. Theory and practice thrive in an atmosphere of mutual tension. Clearly each has its extreme proponents, its "pure" practitioners and theorists, but the most exciting and enduring work in English compositionis situated on that tension-filled threshold where theory and practice mutually inform each other.

After all, when I practice the discipline of composition studies, can my teaching be devoid of theory? Or do I also engage in speculative inquiry, both about teaching and about abstract notions such as audience and the interrelational dynamics of language? In the classroom, can I succeed without a sustained theoretical engagement? As a theorist, can I ground my conjectures in anything other than practice? Is my teaching not a form of speculating, and my theorizing not an inherent form of practice? As a specialist and a scholar in composition studies, is it possible for me to separate the practice of what I do from the theory of who I am? As Wayne Booth has made clear, "The distinction between theory and practice becomes problematic; in our profession, to state a theory is to practice our art, to practice it well or ill; it is an invitation to understand, critically" (21). For Booth, this concept of "critical understanding" lies at the heart of our discipline (see Booth20-26), and it can be achieved only through an amalgamation of theory and practice. Ross Winterowd offers a similar argument in his introduction to A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction by Sharon Crowley:

Every English teacher acts on the basis of theory. Unless teaching is a random series of lessons, drills, and readings, chosen willy-nilly, the English class is guided by theories of language, literature, and pedagogy. That is, insofar as teachers choose readings and plan instruction, they are implementing a theory. The question, of course, is whether or not teachers understand the theory that guides their instruction. If we do not understand the theoretical context in which we function, we are powerless--unable to rationalize what we do and hence stripped of the ability to argue our case with administrators, boards of education, governments, and special interest groups such as, for example, those advocating and condemning bilingual education. (ix)

The claim I would want to make, then, is that theory is a form of practice and that practice is the operational dimension of theory.

As illustration, I offer excerpts from two radically different texts, texts that on the surface seem to argue for the separation of "practice" from "theory" but which actually support the Booth/Winterowd perspective. The first text is Through Teachers' Eyes: Portraits of Writing Teachers at Work, by Sondra Perl and Nancy Wilson; the second an essay by Michel Foucault entitled "What Is an Author?"

In their study of six first- through twelfth-grade writing teachers, Perl and Wilson present a kind of thick description of classroom practice based on observing six different teachers for two years in the ShorehamWading River School District in New York. Significantly, Through Teachers' Eyes includes no footnotes, no bibliography, few if any scholarly citations or textual allusions. It seemingly ignores the disciplinary conversation and theoretical debates that inform English compositionin favor of a largely narrative and descriptive presentation of teacher activities, classroom progress, and student work. As Perl and Wilson describe their ethnographic approach:

We take you inside the classroom and show you daily life, not prettied up or made tidy for outsiders but opened up and made visible for other teachers to look at and understand. We show teachers with their doubts and fears, their questions and dilemmas as they try to make writing--its discovery and its power--available to students. In Through Teachers' Eyes we show teaching as teachers see it. (xiii)

Although all the teachers presented in the text have the benefit of some intensive National Writing Project pedagogy, they are not all equally successful. Through Teachers' Eyes reveals their frustrations and failures as well as their triumphs.

But what looks like transparent reportage and sheer practice is richly laced with theory. Perl and Wilson are aware of the conventions and potential problems of ethnographic research. At the end of her account of the eighth-grade teacher, for example, Perl asks: "Was I too involved? Had I, in ethnographic terms, 'gone native'?" (242). Aware of her sympathy and identification, Perl writes perceptively about her interactive role as both researcher and teacher-colleague. Her understanding of her complicated relationship usefully complicates her research and her conclusions. Perhaps more significantly, Perl and Wilson enter this study with a sophisticated and consciously conceived theory of discourse, one they articulate in their concluding chapter. Here, in a kind of straight-talk for teachers, they advocate their view: the importance of developing writing communities, the necessity for teacherstudent reciprocity, the creative use of authority, the willingness of teachers to move from the arbitrary and authoritarian to the provisional, the experimental, the interactive. What seems throughout the book like talk at the level of pure practice actually presumes a wealth of research and theory. Buried in this prose are, to name just a few, the ideas and words of James Moffett, James Britton, the philosophy of the National Writing Project, Lucy Calkins, Donald Graves, numerous texts on cooperative learning and collaboration, and Perl's own work on the composing process. It is this blend of theory and practice that, to reinvoke Booth's phrase, produces critical understanding.

Foucault "What Is an Author?" might be characterized as pure theory. It is a compact, speculative discussion of authorship in relation to culture and power, a topic of considerable significance to Foucault. My interest here is not to provide a capsule summary of this essay, an impossibility in any case, but to consider just one brief theme expressed by Foucault. Early in his discussion, Foucault considers what is meant by "the idea of the work" (103). He asks:

What is this curious unity which we designate as a work? Of what elements is it composed? Is it not what an author has written? Difficulties appear immediately. If an individual were not an author, could we say that what he wrote, said, left behind in his papers, of what has been collected of his remarks, could be called a "work"? When Sade was not considered an author, what was the status of his papers? Were they simply rolls of paper onto which he ceaselessly uncoiled his fantasies during his imprisonment? (110)

Foucault's concern in this essay is drawn mainly to authors, to writers with public reputations, to creators of the literary. But what are the implications for all writers, particularly student writers? When I teach freshman writing, I never think of their writerly productions as "work" in the sense that Foucault is explicating. As Joseph Williams makes clear in "The Phenomenology of Error," my assumptions about correctness are to a large extent a function of the writer's authority, indeed the writing's authority as a work. What kinds of distorted readings do I give to my students (or, perhaps, to published authors) as a result of this putative notion of "work"? What different kinds of status and interpretation do I assign student writing when it is (a) read and graded as an individual essay produced in class; (b) evaluated anonymously to determine proficiency; (c) considered as part of a research project on composing; (d) viewed in the context of a four-year history of composing in academic settings? How do I view this writing if, ten years later, the writer publishes, becomes famous? What kinds of value do I assign any and all writing by a published author (as opposed to an unpublished author), including notes, fragments, letters, scribblings whether such texts are located on a desk, on a note pad, or within the pages of a manuscript?

What, after all, constitutes a work? And not just what, but when and who and how does such a status get assigned and justified in relation to distributions of power?

For Foucault, the conception of a "work" rests within societal notions of prestige, tradition, author/ity, and power. It also must be understood in the context of other assignments of value in relation to writing: sacral texts, the death of the writer, the absence of the writer, the eternal life of the writer. Foucault is asking us, in effect, what a theory of the work should be--and how such a theory can illuminate what we mean by "an author."

What I am offering here is merely a paper-thin slice of Foucaultian writing, speculations that I am still grappling with as a first-time reader of Foucault's work. My point is that such theorizing--no matter how seemingly complex and abstract--is inseparable from practice. Difficult as Foucault and many other theorists may be to read, their work both rests firmly within the tradition of practice and compels us to successively reconceive it.

The best of recent scholarship in English compositionis similarly not categorizable under the rubric of either theory or practice; neither of those terms suffices. Rather, the scholarly efforts I am characterizing here are positioned on that ambivalent threshold shared by both theory and practice: William Coles' brilliant theoretical narrative of teaching, The Plural I and After; Mina Shaughnessy's informed and eloquent account of basic writing, Errors and Expectations; Mike Rose autobiographical Lives on the Boundary; and Lev Vygotsky's psycholinguistic exploration of word, meaning, and the growth of mind, Thought and Language. These are works that are difficult to categorize; they participate in a number of academic and non-academic genres. This is true of other such works: Janet Emig's personalized and scholarly The Web of Meaning; David Bartholomae's and Tony Petrosky's ethnography of basic writing, Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts; C. H. Knoblauch's and Lil Brannon's iconoclastic and invigorating account of classical and contemporary rhetoric in the classroom, Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing, or Karen Burke LeFevre's learned and persuasive argument concerning the relations among originality, influence, mind, and language, Invention as a Social Act. And I must include two works not commonly considered part of composition studies: Robert Pirsig's novelistic account of rhetorical traveling, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; and Mikhail Bakhtin's complex and stylistically sensitive analysis of language, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Such works--and the many others that space does not permit me to list here--provide the basis for the kind of critical understanding that Wayne Booth celebrates.

The theory/practice debate, then, can be seen as an outgrowth of a larger effort to locate and consolidate our discipline. Important as it is for the shapers of English compositionto define the discipline, we do so at our peril. Definitions are exclusionary; the will to categorize creates constricting ideologies. David Bartholomae eloquently addressed this issue in his Chair's Address at the 1988 CCCC Convention:

I am suspicious of calls for coherence. I suspect that most of the problems in academic life--problems of teaching, problems of thinking--come from disciplinary boundaries and disciplinary habits. . . . As I see it, our central purpose has been to make room for these many voices, to imagine a multivocal, dialogical discipline that reflects in its actions its theoretical opposition to a unifying, dominant discourse. To propose a unifying tradition, a canon, disciplinary boundaries--to do this is to turn our backs on our most precious legacy, which is a willed and courageous resistance to the luxury of order and tradition. (49)