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8/8/2019 Classroom Rhetoric
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Argument, Evidence, and Engagement:
Training Students As Critical Investigators and
Interpreters of Rhetoric and Culture
Allyson D. Polsky
When students first arrive on campus, even at academically elite institutions,
it is highly unlikely that they come with the recognition that all academic writ-
ing is argument-based and that all knowledge claims require substantia-
tion. They have often been educationally and culturally conditioned to grant
authors too much authority, and for the most part they are quite aware of their
position in the knowledge hierarchy. While harshly critical of their own logic
leaps, sloppy support, organization flaws, and other cardinal sins, most stu-dents are reluctant to acknowledge similar failings in any established author,
particularly one assigned by their professor. It is rare, then, that they see
themselves as the audience being addressed or as an audience even worth
addressing, much less as one that an author is actively attempting to persuade
to believe or to act in a certain way.
Pedagogically, I have been hesitant to organize argument courses
around familiar public debates (capital punishment, drug policy, etc.) for two
main reasons. First, these debates tend to produce sides too sharply drawnand arguments too obviously and clearly formulated. Students may choose
sides solely because of their emotional response, their perception of which
side will be easier to defend, or their sense of where the teacher stands. Sec-
ond, and more significantly, to restrict the scope of an argument course to
explicit debates is to neglect the relationship between argument and knowl-
edge production, a relationship that pervades academic writing across the dis-
ciplines but is rarely acknowledged.
427
Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture
Volume 3, Number 3, 2003 Duke University Press
F r o m t h e C l a s s r o o m
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For these reasons, I use not an argument-based composition text but a
broad range of modern nonfiction prose in my writing- and revision-intensive
undergraduate course at Yale University. In the first part of the course, I intro-
duce the students to texts that theorize how rather than just whatwords and
images mean. Reading and writing projects enable them to become aware ofhow we interpret the interaction of words and images to make sense of the
world and how that interaction is embedded in relations of knowledge and
power. The second part of the course builds on this foundation and applies it
to the analysis of contemporary topics including racial profiling, abortion pol-
itics, and pornography.
The first reading is an excerpt from a collection of Jules David Prowns
(2002) seminal writings titledArt As Evidence: Writings on Art and Material
Culture. Widely regarded as the father of material-culture studies, Prown
champions artifacts, which he defines as man-made or man-modified objects,
as primary data. He believes that by analyzing artifacts, the only historical
occurrences that continue to exist in the present (73), we can gain firsthand
access to the cultures that produced and consumed them.
Prown proposes a systematic method for the study of material culture.
This method privileges objectivity and follows a sequential progression from
description of what can be observed from the object itself, to empatheticdeduction of the relationship between the object and its users, to speculation
and the formulation of hypotheses. Inasmuch as he is concerned with approach-
ing an artifact on its own terms, Prown seeks to overcome cultural perspective
by encouraging awareness of bias and prioritizing sensory engagement over
mental interpretation.
There are excellent reasons to begin the course with Prown. His text
emphasizes that seeing and perceiving are key components of intellectual
engagement, forces careful consideration of the relationship between observa-tion and language, and discourages the rush to reach conclusions before con-
sidering all of the evidence. There is also an element of risk in beginning with
Prown, however. His text can be tricky for students to recognize as an argu-
ment, because his approach aspires to the objectivity of scientific method
(Prown 2002: 75). Furthermore, his legendary status as an eminent (Yale) art
historian and my having selected his book as the one with which to initiate
the course may contribute to my students unquestioning acceptance of his
authority.
In the fall 2002 semester, to encourage my students to approach
Prowns text as an argument and evaluate it for themselves, I set out to create
a writing assignment based on empirical research. First I instructed them to
428 Pedagogy
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draft a brief summary of Prowns main ideas. Then I asked them to visit the
Yale University Art Gallery and test Prowns method through the analysis of
an Apple iBook on display in the gallerys permanent exhibition on decorative
arts from the 1950s to the present.
To prevent the interference of cultural perspective, I gave my studentsdetailed written instructions to restrict their description of the iBook to its
appearance, without regard for its function. I told them to pretend that they
were from a time and a culture completely unfamiliar with computers. Vocab-
ulary such as touchpad, keyboard, and screen was therefore prohibited. In
their analyses the students were allowed to consider only external factors
such as their emotional reactions to the iBook, the possible relationships
between it and other nearby items in the gallerys collection, and the reasons
that a curator might include an iBook in an art galleryin the deduction and
speculation stages. After performing Prowns method, the students incorpo-
rated their summaries into three- to four-page essays on their iBook analyses
and their conclusions about Prowns text.
I did not expect all of my students to recognize immediately that on
some level the assignment was an experiment designed to fail, to expose the
weaknesses and areas of contention in Prowns argument. Nevertheless, when
I read their first drafts, I was surprised by the overwhelming degree to whichthey had approached the assignment self-consciously as detached observers
rather than active participants and had internalized this failure. Despite hav-
ing received guidelines that clearly articulated the purpose of the assignment,
many students wrote in their introductions that they were applying rather
than testing Prowns method. Virtually all of them noted that they could
not eliminate cultural perspective from their analyses and found it nearly
impossible to avoid describing or referring to the iBook as a functional device.
When this happened, however, they almost invariably blamed themselves orthe iBook rather than Prowns method. Even when students suppressed their
academic voices and openly expressed their frustration with the experi-
ment, their conclusions contradicted this critique and applauded Prowns
method.
In making sense of their reluctance to question Prowns text and vali-
date their own inquiries, I realized that we cannot expect students to own
their investigations if we ask them to limit their self-awareness in the process
of inquiry and observation. During our postdraft workshop my students and I
discussed this issue and the questions it raised about authority and evidence.
At our next class meeting, a postdoctoral fellow who specializes in twentieth-
century decorative arts (and who had studied with Prown) spoke with my stu-
Polsky Students As Critical Investigators 429
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430 Pedagogy
dents about Prowns method and fielded their questions about the placement
of the artifact in the gallery. Between their first and final drafts, the students
became aware that a range of perspectives, including Prowns, mine, the post-
docs, and their own, guided their evaluation of the strengths of Prowns method
(chiefly that it requires close observation prior to analysis and critique andthat it makes us aware of cultural perspective) and of its limitations (it does
not recognize that cultural perspective may be not a hindrance but a powerful
knowledge source).
As they revised, the students honed their descriptive and analytic
skills considerably, and their final drafts showed greater engagement with the
issues and greater coherence of thought. In subsequent writing they were
more willing to take risks and to question and work through an authors claims
while developing and supporting their own viewpoints. They had begun to
recognize the value of critical reading and inquiry. They saw that questioning
a text was meant not to demolish or dismiss it but to lead to the affirmation of
intellectual curiosity, to stronger support of evidentiary claims, and to deeper
understanding.
Good writing and good arguments are explorations and expressions of
thought. They reflect a process of discovery, not merely an exercise in mas-
tery. Argument courses should enable students to use writing to clarify theirvalues and to arrive at positions that they truly believe in and are inspired
to execute in real-world settings. When students realize that they are active
agents in knowledge production, the result is higher academic performance
and, perhaps more important, a greater investment in scholarship and self-
expression.
Note
I wish to thank Barbara Stuart and Valerie Smith for their helpful comments on an earlier draft
of this essay, Kristina Wilson for the contributions she made to our class discussion of Prowns
method, and Ellen Alvord for enthusiastically coordinating Wilsons visit.
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LaFemina The Creative Writer in the Literature Class 431
Teaching Craft, Teaching Criticism:
The Creative Writer in the Literature Class
Gerry LaFemina
As a poet holding an M.F.A. in creative writing and an M.A. in literature, I am
often asked by my colleagues on the critical front how, exactly, I teach litera-
ture. Explaining that I teach literature as a writer is not enough, and therefore
I have to explain the various ways I talk about how poems come together as a
series of choices. Larry Leviss poem Wound offers a good illustration. Its
brevity and my own connection with it make it fit well in my introductory-level classes, and the way it relates to other poems of its time and participates
in a dialogue with other poems in a more timeless and international context
allows it also to be taught in upper-level courses, just as its smart craftsman-
ship allows it to be taught as a lyric sample in the creative writing classroom.
Leviss poem perfectly illustrates my belief that contemporary poets bring to
the literature class an understanding of composition that includes a set of cul-
tivated skills that admit, in a seemingly unconscious manner, allusions,
influence, and semiotic and/or cognitive leaps whose effect is realized throughrevision and craftsmanship. Bringing this element into the literature class-
room provides balance to traditional criticism and gives insights to students
who often wonder if writers really think all these things through.
When I teach a poetry workshop, whether at West Virginia University
or at writers conferences or as a visiting professor, I always ask students to
bring copies of one of their favorite poems to the first class meeting. I ask each
student to distribute the copies, read the poem aloud, and talk about why he
or she likes it. I am not looking for an explication; what I am looking for is an
aesthetic statement, some defining sensibility by the student writer for the rest
of the class. I want to know what poetry means for him or her. This is impor-
tant: often student poets do not know what to expect from others in the class;
this first-day exercise allows them access to other poets work that they may be
unfamiliar with and gives them some understanding of how other student
poets think about work. Students expectations are shaped by the work their
peers bring in on the first day.I participate in this exercise, too; I often bring Leviss (1971) poem:
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Ive loved you
the way a man loves an old wound
picked up in a razor fight
on a street nobody remembers.
Look at him:
even in the dark he touches it gently.
When I talk about this poem in workshop, I talk about its importance to me as
a writer. Wound was really the first contemporary poem that sang to me,
and I tell my students how I happened to discover it and the book in which it
appears, Wrecking Crew. This establishes for them my passion for and rela-
tionship to the work. Then I go beyond what I have asked of them: I talk
about the poems form and how seeing this poem as a crafted artwork has
enabled it to stay with me as an important poem. I talk about its two stanzas
of relatively equal length, which enact the meaning of the poems separated
couple. I discuss Leviss use of sounds in the first stanza: howyou and wound
are end-rhymed, the latter echoing the former, so that you is equated with
wound, and how the first and last vowel sounds of the stanza are the same:I,
fight. You are a wound, and I fight. This, I assure them, is deliberate. There
is little other sound play in this stanza.When talking about the second stanza, I point out the tonal shift
enacted by the sudden repetition of sound the distance from this hurting
that Levis establishes with the ee sounds as the poem changes from the us of
the first stanza to this third person, this old man. I also talk about how the
enjambment across the stanza break reinforces the notion of how one person
impacts another person even after their separation. Lastly, I discuss the turn
in the poems last two lines, when the poet addresses the reader, turning the
attention away from the speaker in the first stanza, with Look at him: / evenin the dark he touches it gently. This direct address startles the reader it
brings him or her out of the deep imagism of the poemand then the poem
deflates, well, gently.
We also talk about the centrality of the poems main image: the man
who loves the old wound / picked up in a razor fight // on a street nobody
remembers. It is both concrete and abstract: enough detail is given for the
reader to envision it, but Levis allows the reader space for his or her imagina-
tion to fill in the blanks. Student writers often need to learn how to control the
image, and in Wound one sees a simple control that teaches a great deal.
Furthermore, by going through Leviss poem carefully, I model for students a
very deliberate way of reading. The close reading a workshop affords is one of
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LaFemina The Creative Writer in the Literature Class 433
the ways it works well; in this respect, the workshop is very much like the lit-
erature classroom.
I have taught this poem in forms classes, in poetry survey classes, and
in contemporary literature classes. One advantage the practicing poet has in
the literature classroom is the ability to choose work that he or she is passionateaboutand passionate in a different way than literary critics are. It is a passion
born of the shared experience of composition in the art form, a passion for
poems that invigorate the poet or challenge him or her to try a new artistic par-
adigm. I pick poems that I care about to emphasize certain points; whether
I am discussing form, meter, alliteration, extended metaphor, or the various
arguments for a logic of the line, I pick poems as illustrations that interest me
as a writer. In this way I supplement what the critic brings to students.
Therefore I often talk about the structure of Wound in the literature
classroom, as I do above, emphasizing that form helps enact meaning and that
even free verse has an apparent formal component. Still, teaching literature
means teaching more than structure: I teach influence and how the poem is a
product of its literary time. As David Young (2001: 62) notes, For all its date
[1972] . . . Wrecking Crew is very much a book of the sixties. Its poems are
influenced by the minimalist surrealism of that era and by the Spanish and
Latin American poets who were read with vigor at that time. My literature stu-dents will have read other poets of that era for instance, Charles Simic,
Mark Strand, or Jean Valentine and later we will talk about Laura Jensen
and see how her work continues this tradition.
There are, however, other influences in this poem more direct
influences that I think are important to discuss. First, there is the obvious
influence of Donald Justice. Although Wrecking Crew had already come out,
Justices work and influence made Levis want to study with him at Syracuse
University. The two inevitably influenced each other, as we see in the thirdsection of Justices (1995: 24) poem Sadness, which begins:
I say the wood within is the dark wood
or a wound no torn shirt can entirely bandage,
but the sad hand returns to it in secret
repeatedly encouraging the bandage
to speak of that other world we might have borne.
The gesture here this sad hand that returns . . . in secret to the
wound alludes to the hand in Leviss poem that touches it gently. In the
literature class it is essential to show how writers, especially those who are
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ones contemporaries, often create a dialogue, formally, rhythmically, and imag-
istically. Poets have always participated in a conversation on the page with
their contemporaries and with their literary ancestors; therefore our discus-
sion of Levis and Justice leads to talk about the chain of influence.
I also call attention to the influence of Latino poets on Leviss work.As a southern California poet who grew up with migrant Mexican workers
(see Picking Grapes in an Abandoned Vineyard, from The Dollmakers
Ghost[Levis 1981]), he would have had access to the language of the Latin
American poets. Their influence, especially that of Csar Vallejo, is apparent
in Leviss work. More important, Levis was influenced early on by Federico
Garca Lorca, especially early Lorca (c. 1921 24); an imprint of later Lorca
stands out on the poems that would become Leviss The Dollmakers Ghost,
which includes his Garca Lorca: A Photograph of the Granada Cemetery,
1966.
Often literature students, especially those in freshman and sophomore
classes, fail to understand that poems do not happen in a vacuum, that they
are not just inspired products of emotional release they are a part of dia-
logue that crosses time, style, and geography. In survey courses, as we go
through the late twentieth century, I point out Justices influence on Levis
again and again (for instance, Justices poem The Poet at Seven obviouslyinfluenced, at least thematically and in the title, Leviss The Poet at Seven-
teen). I emphasize that writing is about choices, trends, influences, vision,
and artistic challenges born of engagement with other written work. When
working with Levis, we see how his vision helps him find poets who then
influence him but also allows him to shape those influences in order to define
his personal aesthetic and his later work.
Therefore, when I talk about Levis in the literature class, I turn to his
later work to help define some of the changes in American poetry since the1960s: the movement away from deep imagism to meditation, the reemer-
gence of lyricism, the appearance of new formalism, the debates about whether
poetry really matters, the ascension of Jorie Graham. Using this work also
emphasizes how those early influences remain. (I may have my students read
both The Poet at Seven and The Poet at Seventeen to show them how
influence continues but style changes; I have them read early and later Lorca
and early and later Levis and may have them write about how the two poets
mirror each other as they evolve and how they are different.) I also point out
how the imagist minimalism of Leviss early works continues to influence line
and stanza in his later, longer poems.
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Dallas and Marwitz Deconstructing an Honors Classroom 435
As a writer, I bring to this discussion another element: a legacy of
being influenced by certain writers. My literary DNA can be traced through
Levis to them. Often writers who teach in the literature classroom, because
the moves they have made in the creation of a work resemble those of the
writers they teach, can recognize facets of poetic practice that other literaryscholars might miss. In the literature classroom I am a poet; a poet does not
just sit and compose poems without influence but is engrossed and engaged
in the traditions of those writers who came before. Like engineers who take
apart engines only to put them back together, gain insight into their workings,
and improve the next generation of engines, poets who teach literature break
down poems to see how they work, and they can revitalize and reimagine
those themes, rhythms, images, and so forth in their own work and in the lit-
erature classroom in such a way that their students can understand the mech-
anisms that make the poem come to life. That experience is the writers great-
est asset in the literature classroom.
Community or Contact Zone?
Deconstructing an Honors Classroom
Phyllis Surrency Dallas and Mary Marwitz
At the Modern Language Association Literacy Conference in 1990, Mary
Louise Pratt (1999: 584) identified contact zones as social spaces where
cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highlyasymmetrical relations of power (see also Bizzell 1994; Miller 1994; van Slyck
1997). Pratt juxtaposes community with contact zone, defining the former
as an imaginary, idealized construction, suspect because its assumed unity
suppresses rather than liberates marginalized voices. She is especially dis-
turbed by the dangers posed by an idealized vision of community that legit-
imizes the professor as authority (Pratt 1999: 59093), a concern informing
our approach to an introductory composition sequence for honors students.
Given that students often suppose that there is an idealized commu-
nity of readers for texts, we wanted the curriculum to end students search for
one voice speaking the truth. We hoped to provide provocative readings that,
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as Richard E. Miller (1994: 408) suggests about Pratts notions of idealized
structures, would create contact zones, liberatory because students and teach-
ers must learn how to read, understand, and respond to the strange, some-
times threatening, multivocal texts. While pleased with our course design,
we faced challenges in deconstructing the honors identity and in the class-rooms power dynamics. As we planned the course, Seeing and Writing, we
realized that the honors students would probably have a strong sense of com-
munity. The Georgia Southern University Bell Honors Program, an endowed
four-year program, lends itself to this strong sense because its students take
courses together and study all year with the same writing instructors. Our
middle-class student population was not greatly diverse. Aside from one Bul-
garian, our students were American-raised and almost all from small towns in
southern Georgia; aside from one Asian Americanan adopted Korean
they were white. They uniformly considered themselves academically tal-
ented, and almost all had majors tending, as Maynard Mack Jr. (1996) observes
of most honors students, toward the sciences and vocationalism.
To ensure that these students were not seduced by a false notion of
community, we chose texts that required them to examine different perspec-
tives and that we hoped would encourage diverse responses from them. We
read symbiotic texts, those with common plots and characters (Mary creditsDavid Cowart for the idea of symbiotic pairs). For example, we paired The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Mary Reilly, Jane Eyre with
Wide Sargasso Sea. We tried, as Phyllis van Slyck (1997: 155) writes, to con-
struct a different contact zone, where students examined texts which fore-
ground and critique different cultural groups attitudes towards a common
issue. Pairing canonical accounts with postcolonial (Wide Sargasso Sea) and
with the marginalized (Mary Reilly), we wanted to decenter traditional read-
ings and require students to rethink and reread both literary and personaltexts. As our students learned to recognize that the symbiotic texts questioned
assumptions about social class, gender, and culture that were embedded in
the urtexts, we hoped that they would begin to question assumptions about
themselves.
To reinforce the liberal arts foundation of the honors program and to
prevent our voices from dominating, we invited faculty from womens, post-
colonial, and biblical studies to guest-lecture. These guest speakers, embody-
ing the disparate voices of the academy, served, as one student noted, as a
kind of symbiont to the usual professors. Furthering the theme of multiple
perspectives, we offered alternative readings of the texts through scholarly
articles and through our own responses to the texts. Although the students
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indicated that they sometimes felt as if they were serving two mastersa
key phrase fromDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde we wanted them to appreciate that
readers can and do respond to texts as individuals.
Rather than accommodate the additional, often contradictory view-
point of the symbiont, however, these students tended to use the second textas a corrective for the first and to reduce the complexity of the paired read-
ings to a single one. Thus, instead of promoting diversity as we had hoped,
the symbiont texts led our students to what they saw as the realstory. After
reading Wide Sargasso Sea, they knew the realRochester. One student admit-
ted: I will never look atJane Eyre in the same way again. . . . The portrayal
of Rochester in the new text has permanently changed my opinion of him in
the original work. Sometimes students insisted on collapsing the two texts
into one, enlarged text. A book written as an alternate point of view is not
complete without the book it is based on, one student argued in defense of
his need for unity.
At other times students surprised us by rejecting the second text as not
right. Because in Wide Sargasso SeaJean Rhys uses the name Antoinette for
the character of Bertha fromJane Eyre and shifts the chronology to highlight
the problems of colonialism in the Caribbean, one student dismissed the novel
out of hand. With the pairing of Hippolytus and Phaedra, many studentswere disturbed that Jean Racine had dared alter Phaedras death and add a
character (Aricia) even though they learned that Euripides himself had
manipulated the mythology for dramatic purposes. They wanted the text to
be authoritative, wanted one reading, wanted power to be simple, direct, clearly
identifiable. In other words, they were uncomfortable with coexisting belief
systemsat least in the classroom.
Despite our goal of deconstructing the imagined community and pro-
moting multiple voices, we found it difficult to elicit disagreement or disso-nance in the classroom. This reaction should not seem unusual, considering
the traits that Paul F. Haas (1992) attributes to honors students, especially the
smartest ones, who are often enculturated by a system that assumes a right
answer and rewards them for reiterating it. The performance anxiety of our
students often prevented them from voicing or accepting alternatives in a pub-
lic forum.
From their reading responses and the cover letters to their essays,
however, we realized that disagreement did occur outside class. In these pieces
they spoke of bouncing ideas that they themselves characterized as bizarre or
far-fetched offselected friends. In the safe zone of the dorm at 3 A.M., they
had ranged widely in their responses. By sharing these far-fetched reactions
Dallas and Marwitz Deconstructing an Honors Classroom 437
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with us privately, perhaps they were hoping for our validation before offering
their bizarre theories to the rest of their peers in class. When a response
counted in the classroom, the students were less daring, less likely to ven-
ture a possibly wrong answer. To modify Miller (1998: 17) slightly, The
higher one climbs the [academic] ladder, the more one must . . . ascribe to thedominant ideology, the more confined are those spaces for voicing ones
doubts about that ideology, the more one must see oneself as always on stage.
Although one student commented that in a community a person can grow
and learn without fear of being inhibited by the other members of the com-
munity, in reality the public forum seems to have been more inhibiting than
she recognized, and only the smallest differences of opinion were voiced in
our classroom.
James C. Scotts discussion inDomination and the Arts of Resistance
of a public transcript and a hidden transcript (Miller 1998: 15) sheds light
on this uniformity of opinion, as does Millers (1998: 14) perceptive question
whether Paulo Freires liberatory pedagogy leeches the power dynamic out
of the teacher-student relationship. As Miller writes, The students . . . never
forget where they are, no matter how carefully we arrange the desks in the
classroom, how casually we dress, how open we are to disagreement, how
politely we respond to their journal entries, their papers, their portfolios.They dont forget; we often do (18).
Occasionally, however, the hidden transcript becomes public, and
fear and resentment emerge. When a guest speaker, a former Lutheran minis-
ter currently teaching the Bible as literature, dispassionately presented vari-
ous approaches to biblical texts, he touched a nerve that our analysis of more
distant texts like Hamlethad not. Though silent in his presence, the students
were clearly distressed. Later, when we explicitly asked for their reactions,
they spoke. This time they seemed afraid not of having the wrong answer butof having their beliefs questioned. Some objected to what this authority had
presented as multiple approaches to biblical scholarship. No, they argued
vehemently, the Bible is not open to interpretation. When confronted with a
more complicated reading of a text, they again retreated to the comfortable,
reducing complexity to simplicity. They had found themselves in a contact
zone, a social space where the culture of authority differed from what they
had been given as the truth about themselves and the world. One student said
that although he did have some questions now, he knew he wasnt supposed
to. He and others who squirmed under the challenge were demonstrating the
fear of educations disruptive powers (Miller 1998: 22). Despite our efforts
to open the classroom, to deconstruct the honors community, to challenge
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Works Cited for From the Classroom 439
our students to think beyond their identities, we had fallen short. The critique
that Scott and Miller offer suggests that we usually will.
However, our experiment showed us that occasionally glimpses of the
contact zone can disrupt the usual. Although the students discomfited by bib-
lical scholarship ultimately retreated to a reductive defensive position, for awhile they felt that they could challenge authority by speaking; they did not
have to remain under the constraints of manufactured consent (Miller 1998:
27). We have perhaps laid the groundwork for their future grapplings with
power.
Works Cited for From the Classroom
Bizzell, Patricia. 1994. Opinion: Contact Zones and English Studies. College English 56:
16369.
Haas, Paul F. 1992. Honors Programs.Liberal Education. Accessed on 8 February 2001 at
search.epnet.com/direct.asp?an=9608042123&db=aph.
Justice, Donald. 1995. Sadness. InNew and Selected Poems, 24. New York: Knopf.
Levis, Larry. 1971. Wound. In Wrecking Crew, 11. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh
Press.
. 1981. The Dollmakers Ghost. New York: Dutton.
Mack, Maynard, Jr. 1996. These Things Called Honors Programs.Liberal Education.
Accessed on 8 February 2001 at search.epnet.com/direct.asp?an=9707290082&db=aph.
Miller, Richard E. 1994. Fault Lines in the Contact Zone. College English 56: 389408.
. 1998. The Arts of Complicity: Pragmatism and the Culture of Schooling. College
English 61: 1028.
Pratt, Mary Louise. 1999. Arts of the Contact Zone. In Ways of Reading: An Anthology for
Writers, ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. 5th ed., 582 96. Boston:
Bedford/St. Martins.
Prown, Jules David. 2002.Art As Evidence: Writings on Art and Material Culture. New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press.
van Slyck, Phyllis. 1997. Repositioning Ourselves in the Contact Zone. College English 59:
14969.
Young, David. 2001. Reading Larry Levis.Field 64: 6178.