[In the following essay, Flynn focuses on various obstacles to the growth of a postmodern feminist viewpoint within the areas of composition and rhetoric.]

[W]e should investigate ways of giving an identity to the sciences, to religions, and to political policies and of situating ourselves in relation to them as subjects in our own right.

—Luce Irigaray, Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference

Clearly, differentiation between strong and weak, powerful and powerless, has been a central defining aspect of gender globally, carrying with it the assumption that men should have greater authority than women, and should rule over them. As significant and important as this fact is, it should not obscure the reality that women can and do participate in politics of domination, as perpetrators as well as victims—that we dominate, that we are dominated.

—bell hooks, Talking Back

In philosophy, a commitment to one or more of the following lays on open to the charge of scientism.

a) The sciences are more important than the arts for an understanding of the world in which we live, or, even, all we need to understand it.

b) Only a scientific methodology is intellectually acceptable. Therefore, if the arts are to be a genuine part of human knowledge they must adopt it.

c) Philosophical problems are scientific problems and should only be dealt with as such.

—Paul Noordhof, “Scientism”

Positivism. 1. A system of philosophy elaborated by Auguste Comte from 1830 onwards, which recognizes only positive facts and observable phenomena, with the objective relations of these and the laws that determine them, abandoning all inquiry into causes or ultimate origins, as belonging to the theological and metaphysical stages of thought, held to be now superseded.

—OED

In this chapter, I focus on obstacles to the development of postmodern-feminist perspectives within the field of rhetoric and composition, discuss a transitional commitment to transactionalism and interactionalism influenced by individuals such as Louise Rosenblatt that anticipated postmodern approaches to reading, writing, and teaching, and suggest that the field is now moving toward postmodern-feminist perspectives as it attempts to overcome the limitations of its scientistic heritage. In struggling for legitimacy within the academy from its beginnings in the mid-twentieth century, a dominant tendency within the field has been identification with modern science and repudiation of nonscientific approaches to the study of writing. As the field has matured, however, it has attempted to develop alternatives to positivistic research models by attending to the political and cultural dimensions of reading, writing, and teaching. The field's belated embrace of feminism and its struggles for legitimacy within the academy make it a valuable site for exploring ways in which modern, antimodern, and postmodern tendencies play themselves out in disciplinary and interdisciplinary arenas. I will discuss the field's complex situation, some limitations of representations of rhetoric and composition as a feminized field, especially their tendency to ignore the field's “masculinization.” I will then describe the field's early identification with the sciences and explain this identification through a discussion of feminist conceptions of the alienating process of “masculinization,” especially in relation to rhetoric and composition's perennial adversary, literary studies. Finally, I will discuss the field's movement beyond scientism and positivism toward postmodern feminism.

FEMINIZATION OR MASCULINIZATION?

Rhetoric and composition is a hybrid of several fields including rhetoric, composition studies, and technical communication. Rhetoric has a long history and ancient origins, composition studies is considerably more recent, focusing especially on the teaching of writing at the college level, and technical communication focuses primarily on writing in nonacademic settings. Although non-Western and feminist rhetorical traditions have recently been charted, histories of rhetoric typically focus on an androcentric tradition that includes discussion of Greek, Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, modern, and postmodern traditions. Composition studies emerged in 1949 with the creation of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), a division of the National Council of Teachers of English. Primarily pedagogical in orientation, composition studies is interdisciplinary, drawing on a number of fields including rhetoric, anthropology, linguistics, literary theory, psychology, education, cultural studies, and aesthetics. Composition studies is related to technical communication in complex ways. Technical communication is both a subfield, in that much work in technical communication is undertaken within the CCCC and within composition journals, as well as a separate field in that it also has its own journals, organizations, conferences, and traditions. Combining rhetoric and composition studies makes clear that the fields are related in important ways; other reasons to combine them are that rhetoric has had an especially strong influence on the development of composition studies and that the fields have often been aligned politically. Obscured by such a joining are the considerable differences between the two fields and the divisions within them. As I have already indicated, composition studies often encompasses technical communication. Rhetoric can also be divided into two subfields of rhetorical history and theory and of speech communication—two subfields with quite different institutional histories. There are, nevertheless, ways in which the designation rhetoric and composition accurately describes a hybrid field. The journal Rhetoric Review, for instance, is as likely to contain articles on composition studies as it is on historical or theoretical rhetoric, and a number of scholars work actively in both areas.

As I explain in chapter 7, important in understanding the recent history of rhetoric and composition is its frequent situation within English departments and its conflict with the field that is often dominant within English departments, literary studies. Compositionists such as Susan Miller in Textual Carnivals, John Schilb in Between the Lines, and numerous others (e.g. Bullock and Trimbur; Berlin Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures) have pointed out that literary studies is considerably more powerful within English studies than rhetoric and composition. Within English departments, they argue, compositionists are frequently out-numbered by literature specialists, and compositionists often hold positions that ensure their marginality. If they are non-tenure-track, they are often part-time, temporary teachers of first-year English, or if they are tenure-track, they are administrators of relatively low-status programs such as first-year English or technical writing. Despite the increasing status of rhetoric and composition within the academy in recent years, there does not seem to have been a major shift in the balance of power within English departments. Technical communication is frequently even more marginalized than rhetoric and composition. Rhetoric and composition, then, is a particularly rich site for exploring the impact of feminism within the academy.

Compositionists such as Susan Miller, Sue Ellen Holbrook, Theresa Enos, and others have provided very useful accounts of rhetoric and composition's feminine attributes and marginal status within the academy and within English studies¹ as a result of its being composed largely of women, many of whom teach part-time and have heavy teaching loads. Miller in Textual Carnivals describes compositionists as victims and uses the metaphor of the sad woman in the basement, an allusion to Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic. Miller's book is a portrayal of the field's struggle for legitimacy within the academy and especially of its subjugation by its most threatening adversary, the field of literary studies.² This struggle has been recounted in articles and books such as The Politics of Writing Instruction edited by Richard Bullock and John Trimbur and Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures by James A. Berlin.³

The concept of feminization is powerful because it suggests that feminist analyses of the situation of women can be usefully applied analogously to academic fields. If women can be abused and undervalued, fields of study can be as well. A limitation of the feminization metaphor, however, is that it can tend toward essentialized and oversimplified conceptions of gender. Compositionists are seen primarily as victims even though they are gaining power within the academy through large grants, large programs in first-year English, technical writing, writing-across-the-curriculum, the development of writing centers and computing centers, and graduate programs that are successfully placing students. Also, many compositionists who have gained administrative experience developing composition programs are now moving into positions of power and authority within university bureaucracies.

Another limitation of the feminization metaphor is that it suggests that the field is a unified one, though this is hardly the case. Compositionists occupy positions of varying status within the academy and often have very different teaching, research, or service roles so conflicts and power struggles among compositionists—sometimes among women and feminist compositionists—are inevitable. The battle in which Linda Brodkey struggled against Maxine Hairston and John Ruszkiewicz over the composition curriculum at the University of Texas at Austin was played out in a national arena.⁴ Discussions among colleagues at composition conferences suggest that such intragroup struggles and tensions are widespread. In the early phases of the field's development, the situation of having a common adversary, literature specialists, may have united compositionists. As the field has matured, however, it has tended to fragment.

If compositionists have sometimes been sad women in the basement, they have also often attempted to overcome their marginalization through identification with more powerful fields. If they have been feminized, they have also sometimes been “masculinized” by attempting to increase their status by emulating the techniques, beliefs, and attitudes of fields more powerful than their own. Such emulation has been complex and has occurred on multiple sites. I will focus here on some negative consequences of identification with the sciences and social sciences on the part of empirical researchers, a form of identification I call scientism. Such identification has occurred as the field has struggled to gain stature within the academy and within English studies, a result of its marginalization within English departments. One consequence of scientism has been the development of positivistic approaches to language and knowledge and an inattention to the political dimensions of language. I do not mean to suggest, however, that there have been no positive consequences of identification with the sciences; scientifically oriented empirical research has contributed substantially to the field's development and growth. Also, scientism and positivism have by no means been limited to the field of rhetoric and composition. Scientistic tendencies pervade other humanistic discourses such as literary theory. The scientism and positivism of empirical researchers are but two of many tendencies identifiable as rhetoric and composition has emerged as a field and is not clearly separable from other tendencies and influences, as will become obvious when I discuss alternatives to scientism and positivism within the field.

It is tempting, in considering the marginalization of rhetoric and composition from a feminist perspective, to construct a simple, binary opposition with literary studies associated with the dominant male and rhetoric and composition with the subordinate female. As I will argue, however, such an explanation not does allow for complexity and contradiction. Literary studies, for instance, is itself marginalized within the academy, especially in relation to the sciences. Also, rhetoric and composition, because it often deals with practical rather than aesthetic concerns, is frequently in a better situation than is literary studies to align itself with powerful forces within and beyond the academy such as industry and government. A binary and hierarchical description of the relationship between the fields also overlooks the fact that there are progressive, moderate, and conservative traditions within both fields so oppositional descriptions are necessarily reductive. Finally, the two fields are concerned both with reading and writing and the production and consumption of texts. Institutional partitioning has artificially separated fields that have much in common.

SCIENTISM AND POSITIVISM

The site of rhetoric and composition as it emerged as a discipline is well suited to a feminist analysis of the damaging effects of scientistic and positivistic tendencies on disciplinary development and to an exploration of alternative ways of achieving legitimacy within the academy. In the field's early years, research was often synonymous with scientifically oriented empirical research, and identifications with the sciences and social sciences were clear attempts to gain authority by association with more authoritative discourses. Robert J. Connors in “Composition Studies and Science” speaks of this impulse as a “yearning toward the power and success of the natural sciences” (4). As rhetoric and composition has matured, however, it has become increasingly self-reflective and self-critical and has also developed traditions that provide alternatives to scientism and positivism.

In the early years of its development, rhetoric and composition relied heavily on research models developed in the social sciences, especially psychology and education. A prevalent approach involved comparison of groups that were given different treatments. In such an approach, the researcher formulates a hypothesis, selects an experimental group and a control group, administers a treatment to the experimental group, and measures the effect of the treatment. Every attempt is made to eliminate possible contaminating effects of the researcher's intervention and to limit the number of variables being measured and controlled. The results of such experiments were often granted the authority of scientific knowledge.

Stephen M. North in The Making of Knowledge in Composition says that he assembled a list of well over one thousand experimental studies in rhetoric and composition conducted between 1963 and 1985 and thinks that the total number is closer to fifteen hundred—more studies than that produced by all of the other research methods in rhetoric and composition combined (142). North sees the experimentalists as having the oldest history and the largest community of researchers within rhetoric and composition (141), though he does not think they have exercised anything like a proportionate influence on the field (144).

This commitment to scientific approaches to research is evident in Research in Written Composition by Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer. These authors make clear that they only included research that employed “scientific methods” such as controlled experimentation. They argue that research in composition has not frequently been conducted with the knowledge and care that one associates with the physical sciences, and they compare research in composition to chemical research as it emerged from the period of alchemy (5). Of the references for further research that they append to their study, all 504 are, in one form or another, experimental.

Essays by Maxine Hairston and by Linda Flower provide justifications for the field's turn toward science to gain authority and even dominance within the academy and within English departments. Hairston's “The Winds of Change” was written in the spirit of Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer's Research in Written Composition. In the essay, Hairston is enthusiastic about scientific approaches to the study of writing, though her invocation of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions suggests a critical perspective on the sciences as well. She argues that the field of rhetoric and composition, at the time she was writing, was undergoing a paradigm shift from a product-oriented paradigm to a process-oriented one. Hairston attributes the emergence of an enlightened approach to the teaching of writing to research and experimentation. Empirical investigations of the composing processes of actual writers have provided the data compositionists need to understand how writing really is accomplished, she claims. Those in the vanguard of the profession, Hairston tells us, are “attentively watching the research on the composing process in order to extract some pedagogical principles from it” (78). For the first time in the history of teaching writing, Hairston says, we have specialists who are doing “controlled and directed research on writers' composing processes” (85). Even graduate assistants in traditional literary programs are getting their in-service training, according to Hairston, from rhetoric and composition specialists in their departments (87).⁵

That Hairston saw empirical research in composition as a defense against the domination of literary studies becomes clear in “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing,” published ten years after “The Winds of Change.” In the essay she refers to her 1985 CCCC chair's address in which she warned that the field needed to establish its psychological and intellectual independence from the literary critics if it hoped to flourish. She then proceeds to rail against the radical left who she thinks are attempting to co-opt the field (187). By 1992, however, empirical research was losing its power as a defense, and Hairston's tone changes from the spirited optimism of “The Winds of Change” to anger and frustration.

Linda Flower's “Cognition, Context, and Theory Building,” though on one level an acknowledgment of the social and political dimensions of writing and hence an acceptance of approaches to language advanced by literary theorists committed to postmodernism, is ultimately an argument for the superiority of scientific approaches to research over other approaches. In this essay, Flower is indirectly responding to critics, no doubt including literary or cultural theorists within her own department, who challenge the idea that empirical research has greater authority than other forms of research.

An essay by David Shumway published several years after Flower's suggests the nature of the critique of her work that may have motivated her essay. Shumway, a colleague of Flower's at Carnegie Mellon, acknowledges in “Science, Theory, and the Politics of Empirical Studies in the English Department” that Flower is not a naive empiricist. He nevertheless finds unconvincing her claim that her work aims to build theory and finds the cognitive theory she employs self-reproducing (155). Shumway suggests that empirical studies such as those conducted by Flower and by others are arguments that have the same epistemological status as other forms of discourse and that empirical data have the same status as other forms of evidence (156). No doubt the other forms of discourse and other forms of evidence he has in mind are the interpretive investigations that he engages in.

In “Cognition, Context, and Theory Building,” Flower provides a careful, well-developed defense against her challengers, though she never explicitly acknowledges who they are or what their charges are. The goal of her essay, she says, is the development of an “integrated theoretical vision” that will bring together theories that explain literacy in terms of individual cognition and those that see “social and cultural context as the motive force in literate acts” (282). Her answer is an interactive theory that will explain how context cues cognition, and how cognition, in turn, mediates and interprets the particular world that context provides (282). She calls for a “grounded vision” that can place cognition in its context while celebrating the power of cognition to change that context (284). Flower claims that cognition and context interact equally and reciprocally, so there is no need to frame the question of how they can be integrated in terms of conflict or power imbalances (287). Flower aims to eliminate rigid boundaries and artificial distinctions, values integration and synthesis, and attempts to demonstrate that intellectual traditions are not necessarily competing and agonistic. Her essay would seem to be informed by a cultural-feminist commitment to community and nurturance. As the essay proceeds, however, it becomes clear that she implicitly privileges empirical research over other forms of research.

Flower takes pains to make clear that she is not a naive positivist who believes that knowledge can be found simply by observing external reality and recording one's findings. She demonstrates she is aware that observation involves interpretation and argumentation when she says, “Within the conventions of research, however, the ‘results’ of a given study, especially those which merely show a correlation, are just one more piece of evidence in cumulative, communally constructed argument” (300). Although she has come a long way from the simplistic cognitive theories she was advancing in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she is finally not successful in overcoming her earlier commitments to cognitivism and positivism. For one thing, she has a limited conception of context. She says that context includes (but is apparently not limited to) other people, the past, the social present, cultural norms, available language, intertextuality, assignment giving, and collaboration (287). It would seem that context includes everything other than the individual language user. It becomes evident as the essay progresses, however, that for Flower, context means the immediate social context within which a writer is situated, the context of the classroom or of the immediate group of peers, and a social exigency (287). The historical past, the linguistic system, intertextuality, and other factors seem to drop out of the picture entirely. Although Flower admits that context can be either nurturing or oppressive (289), it becomes obvious that the individual writer she describes inhabits a relatively benign world where intentions are purposeful and fully conscious. She dismisses conceptions of context that emphasize its overdetermination and complexity and conceptions of research that insist on the situatedness and partiality of the researcher.

But for all of Flower's insistence that research is not a simple matter of gathering and reporting data in a transparent way, she continues to use language such as “Good data is assertive and intractable” (299). Such statements suggest that the researcher is a passive absorber rather than an active agent. Such a view of research is at odds with an interactional approach to language where the writer (who is also the researcher in this case) is seen as mediating contextual cues and as being a purposeful and active producer of meaning. Flower's desire to connect seemingly disparate discourses, such as cognitive and social approaches to empirical research, and to view interaction as benign and nonconflictual, certainly a utopian impulse, becomes a defense of the authority and value neutrality of the empirical researcher and, implicitly, of the superiority of the results of such research over other kinds of research. Empiricism results in authoritative truth claims because it makes use of data that accurately describe reality.⁶

Scientistic and positivistic approaches to the study of writing have often led to the development of reductive conceptions of reading and writing and limited conceptions of the role of the researcher in the research process. Rhetoric and composition professionals' longing for legitimacy and power within the academy has sometimes resulted in identifications that have had unfortunate consequences. Though valuable in providing the field, early in its development, an identity separate from that of literary studies, scientism has also provided rhetoric and composition a false sense of the significance and authority of its research results. Scientism has also begun to lose its effectiveness as a defense against postmodern literary theorists who insist that scientific truth claims are provisional and subject to change.

A commitment to scientism has at times limited the field's vision of what should be investigated. Too often, compositionists have allowed other fields to dictate to them, not recognizing the importance of having research questions and methods grow out of composition's own problems and questions. Ellen Quandahl points out in “The Anthropological Sleep of Composition” that the field has focused so exclusively on the writing student as the subject of composition that it has neglected to examine the work of reading and writing themselves (426). This neglect is no doubt a result of allowing other fields and disciplines to determine what its research questions and methods will be rather than developing its own. As Gesa E. Kirsch and Joy S. Ritchie observe in their essay “Beyond the Personal: Theorizing a Politics of Location in Composition Research,” strong identifications with traditional approaches to empirical research have also resulted in our neglecting to collaborate with research subjects not only in the development of research questions and the interpretation of data at both the descriptive and interpretive but also in the writing of research reports.

One especially serious consequence of the dominance of the methods and epistemologies of the sciences and the social sciences in the field's early development has been that feminist and other approaches that provide richly contextual and politicized representations of language have been ignored until quite recently. We have not developed strategies of resistance that these approaches would encourage. The story Nancy Sommers tells in “Between the Drafts” of her identification with more-powerful male theorists, and the consequence of this identification, a muting of her own voice, powerfully demonstrates the debilitating effects of “masculinized” approaches to research. She speaks of being stuck in a way of seeing: reproducing the thoughts of others and using them as her guides (28). Feminist theory provides diverse perspectives on how this process of masculinization works. Radical feminists tend to emphasize the ways in which masculinization has been damaging to women, cultural feminists emphasize women's different ways of being in the world, whereas postmodern feminists suggest that some forms of identification with powerful males can be empowering for women.

RADICAL-, CULTURAL-, AND POSTMODERN-FEMINIST CONCEPTIONS OF “MASCULINIZATION”

Radical feminist Judith Fetterley in The Resisting Reader coined the term immasculation to describe the alienation experienced by women who were taught to think as men, to identify with a male point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate a system of male cultural values, one of whose central principles is misogyny (xx). Fetterley saw immasculation as a better term than emasculation for the cultural reality of the power relations between women and men. Often, Fetterley observed, a woman “is asked to identify with a selfhood that defines itself in opposition to her; she is required to identify against herself” (xii). Fetterley urged women readers to resist domination and to become resisting readers.

Cultural feminist Tania Modelski in Feminism without Women is worried about the masculinization of feminism itself, especially the tendency within postmodern feminism to place so much emphasis on the dangers of essentialized conceptions of gender that they compromise feminism's ability to bring about political change. She criticizes the emphasis on what she calls “male feminism” in such books as Men in Feminism edited by Alice Jardine and Paul Smith. Modelski sees that such books, insofar as they focus on the question of male feminism as a topic for men and women to engage, bring men back to center stage and divert feminists from tasks more pressing than “deciding about the appropriateness of the label ‘feminist’ for men” (6). Modelski also sees that these books presume a kind of heterosexual presumption and tacitly assume and promote a liberal notion of the formal equality of men and women, whose viewpoints are accorded equal weight. For Modelski, “feminism without women” can mean the triumph either of a male-feminist perspective that excludes women or of a feminist antiessentialism so radical that every use of the term woman is disallowed (15). Modelski concludes her book by warning that the postfeminist play with gender in which differences are elided can easily lead us back into our “pregendered” past where there was only the universal subject—man (163). Modelski's position is cultural feminist in that she thinks women and women's culture should be at the center of her investigation.

Postmodern feminist Julia Kristeva, in contrast, focuses on the complexities of identification with powerful males and explores ways in which some forms of identification can be empowering for women. She speaks in “About Chinese Women” of the namelessness of women (140) and of a tendency of monotheism, paganism, and agrarian ideologies to repress women and mothers (141). Kristeva sees that women have no access to the word or to knowledge and power (142-43). If they choose identification with the mother, they remain excluded from language and culture; if they choose identification with the father, they become an Electra, “frigid with exaltation” (152). Kristeva recommends, instead, a middle way. Paternal identification is necessary in order to have a voice in the chapter of politics and history and in order to escape a “smug polymorphism.” But women need to reject the development of a “homologous” woman who is capable and virile by swimming against the tide and need to reject this by rebelling against the existing relations of production and reproduction (156).

In addition to developing perspectives on the process of masculinization, feminists have also attended specifically to the problems for women posed by the dominance of the sciences within the academy and within society. Modern feminists tend to focus on the exclusion of women from scientific work, and antimodern feminists on the damaging effects of the sciences on women or on women's different ways of doing science, whereas postmodern feminists critique the scientific enterprise as men have traditionally defined it but do not reject it entirely.

MODERN-, ANTIMODERN-, AND POSTMODERN-FEMINIST CRITIQUES OF SCIENCE

Margaret W. Rossiter's Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 is a modern-feminist exploration of the domination of the sciences by men. Rossiter refers to science as a “manly profession.” She documents that the sciences in the late 1800s were attempting to establish themselves as professions and so set up gates for admissions to professional societies on the grounds that they needed to “raise standards.” As a result, membership requirements were deliberately harder on women than on men (73). Rossiter concludes in her subsequent volume, Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action 1940-1972, that during this period, most of women scientists' traditional employers—women's colleges, teachers colleges, and colleges of home economics—were no longer hiring women, largely because of a prejudice against married women, which sometimes took the form of antinepotism laws, and a fear that single women would marry (xv). By the end of the 1960s, though, women were becoming aware of their marginalization, “status of women” reports were conducted, and legislation was enacted mandating equal pay and affirmative action in the academy (xviii).

Evelyn Fox Keller's Reflections on Gender and Science, in contrast, is a cultural-feminist investigation of science. Whereas Rossiter was concerned with identifying the inequalities and exclusionary practices that have pervaded the sciences, Keller seeks to explore ways in which including women's experiences in investigations of science enlarges “our understanding of the history, philosophy, and sociology of science” (9). As I observe in chapter 1 in the context of Keller's study of the work of Barbara McClintock, for Keller, science can be expanded to include women's experience by examining the different ways in which women scientists go about their work and by redefining what science is so as to include women's contributions.

Sandra Harding's Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? differs from Keller's feminist investigation of women's role in scientific work in that it has a postmodern cast. Harding attempts to overcome the essentializing tendencies of cultural-feminist approaches, though she does think that a feminist critique of science should begin with the experiences of women. She extends inquiry into the relationship between feminism and science by including in her discussion the perspectives of feminist political philosophers, African and African American philosophers who critique Eurocentrism, African American feminists, Third World writers, and philosophers, sociologists, and historians writing in the social studies of science (viii).⁷

Postmodern-feminist critics of science also argue that beliefs in the objectivity of the scientist and the neutrality of scientific investigation serve the interests of those in positions of authority and power, usually white males, and exclude those in marginalized positions. Identification by women or by feminized fields with the sciences and social sciences, therefore, may necessitate association with discourses that ignore issues of concern to those in marginalized positions and that arise out of epistemologies antithetical to their needs and interests. Ruth Berman's “From Aristotle's Dualism to Materialist Dialectics: Feminist Transformation of Science and Society” supports this idea. Berman argues that dualist ideology pervades Western science and philosophy and serves the interests of those in positions of power. Berman is careful, however, to provide a complex view of both gender and power, acknowledging that a simple dichotomy of male/female is itself dualistic and ignores the specific details of power relationships, the contradictions within “maleness,” and differences among women (241). She nevertheless sees that both Plato and Aristotle depict mind and body as split with the mind associated with a master-class, males, and the body associated with an inferior class, females. Descartes, while preserving the eternal, supernatural character of the soul, transformed the body into a machine (240). He held that rational thought is objective, and it, alone, leads to truth. The Cartesian perspective, according to Berman, conceptualizes phenomena as composed of discrete, individual, elemental units, the whole consisting of an assemblage of these separate elements. It also assumes a linear, quantitative cause-effect relationship between phenomena (235). Berman calls for a materialist dialectics that sees change as directional rather than random, as a complex, interconnected, interactive process characterized by dialectical struggle, tension, and turbulence (244).

Postmodern feminism has also contributed valuable critiques of scientific and social scientific methods and procedures, emphasizing that research methods in the sciences and the social sciences, while claiming to be objective and neutral, actually reveal a strong male bias. Postmodern feminists also point out that women are often excluded from research samples and that researchers make extraordinary claims for their research because they do not recognize or admit that their own prejudices and values affect research results. Toby Jayaratne and Abigail J. Stewart summarize some of the objections feminists have made to traditional quantitative research methods in their essay, “Quantitative and Qualitative Methods in the Social Sciences: Current Feminist Issues and Practical Strategies.” Such criticism focuses on: selection of sexist and elitist research topics; the absence of research on questions of central importance to women; biased research designs, including selection of only male subjects; an exploitative relationship between researcher and the subject and within research teams; the illusion of objectivity; the simplistic and superficial nature of quantitative data; improper interpretation and over generalization of findings; and inadequate data dissemination and utilization (86). Jayaratne and Stewart make evident that uncritical acceptance of the epistemological underpinnings and methods of the sciences and social sciences is risky for those in marginalized positions.

A postmodern-feminist perspective on science emphasizes the situatedness and the interestedness of the researcher and hence the gendered nature of the research process. It calls into question the authority of the researcher and emphasizes that the research process is far less systematic than it is made out to be. Trinh T. Minhha's Woman, Native, Other provides a good example of a postmodern-feminist critique of anthropology. Trinh speaks of anthropology's “positivist dream” of “a neutralized language that strips off all its singularity to become nature's exact, unmisted reflection” (53). The (male) anthropologist, according to Trinh, claims objectivity and the transparency of language. Words must disappear from the field of visibility and yield ground to “pure presence” (53). What anthropology seeks, according to Trinh, is “its own elevation to the rank of Science” (57). Trinh insists, though, that work in anthropology is actually a form of intellectual bricolage or portpourri that may always be “re-ordered, completed, or refuted by further research” (63). She finds that in anthropological work, “The positivist yearning for transparency with respect to reality is always lurking below the surface” (64).

BEYOND SCIENTISM AND POSITIVISM

Only recently has the field of rhetoric and composition benefited from the feminist explanation of “masculinization” or feminist critiques of science discussed above because its conception research, as I have suggested, was too often positivistic and scientistic. As rhetoric and composition has matured, however, it has become increasingly aware of the limitations of such approaches to writing. Janet Emig in “Inquiry Paradigms and Writing,” for instance, distinguishes between two inquiry paradigms, the positivistic and the phenomenological. For Emig, in the positivist paradigm, there is no context for the inquiry, “only the phenomenon to be examined a-contextually, with no consideration or acknowledgment of setting” (66). Emig sees that positivists believe that a “one-on-one correspondence exists or can be established between a phenomenon and an interpretation of that phenomenon” (67). For positivists, according to Emig, “meaning resides almost exclusively within a text” (68). Other empirically oriented compositionists began to recognize some limitations of the field's scientistic approaches to composition research. Research on Composing: Points of Departure edited by Charles R. Cooper and Lee Odell, for instance, although accepting comparison-group research as a valuable approach to the study of writing, places considerably greater emphasis on the importance of theory and cautions that research results should be seen as tentative rather than definitive.

Later overviews of empirical research in rhetoric and composition provide an increasingly critical perspective on scientific approaches to research. Lillian Bridwell and Richard Beach in New Directions in Composition Research speak of the “mistakes of the past” that occurred because we “grossly oversimplified the nature of written language and the processes by which humans create it” (12). They emphasize the need for a more valid and comprehensive theoretical base for research in composition and call for studies that relate writing to social, political, and psychological contexts (6). Like Cooper and Odell, they call for acknowledgment of the limitations of research methods (9).

George Hillocks, Jr.'s follow-up volume to Braddock et al.'s Research in Written Composition is more directly critical of experimental research. In the introduction to Hillock's volume, Richard Lloyd-Jones effectively dissociates himself from the earlier work, which he coauthored, by claiming that he is actually a “rhetorical theorist.” The material he examined in 1963, he says, “forced me into empiricism” (xiv). Lloyd-Jones applauds the far more varied approach to research in Hillocks's study, which includes case studies and protocols. Also, Hillocks includes in the book an extended discussion of criticisms of experimental studies including problems with control of variables and reporting of data. By the late 1980s, scientistic composition was coming under serious attack by compositionists with political orientations but also by researchers who had begun their careers doing scientific work.

By 1988, when Janice M. Lauer and J. William Asher published their Composition Research: Empirical Designs, there was clearly a need to defend empirical research itself and to explain it to a community of compositionists with commitments to more ethical or humanistic approaches to scholarship. Alan Purves in his foreword speaks of the need to supplement traditions of humanistic research by social science research; Lauer and Asher in their preface are also defensive. In response to those who have reacted to empirical research either by dismissing it or by accepting its conclusions indiscriminately, they argue “that an adequate study of the complex domain of writing must be multidisciplinary, including empirical research” (ix). They call for communication among composition theorists, writing instructors, and empirical researchers and for respect for each other's efforts (ix).

Kirsch and Patricia A. Sullivan in Methods and Methodology in Composition Research respond to the increasing marginalization of empirical researchers by defining research broadly to include historical research and critical theory in addition to social scientific research. Theirs is a self-consciously feminist approach to research. In “Hearing Voices in English Studies,” Margaret Baker Graham and Patricia Goubil-Gambrell trace the field's movement away from methodologies of the sciences and social sciences toward methodologies of the humanities by examining recent issues of Research in the Teaching of English. They observe that in 1978, Alan Purves, editor at the time, noted that RTE [Research in the Teaching of English] was publishing fewer experimental studies and more qualitative studies. By the time Judith Langer and Arthur Appleby were editors of the journal, according to Graham and Goubil-Gambrell, quantitative research was no longer the unquestioned methodology of choice in RTE. Graham and Goubil-Gambrell also see that Sandra Stotsky, the editor at the time their article was published, continued to shift the emphasis away from empiricism (111). Peter Mortensen and Kirsch's Ethics and Representation in Qualitative Studies of Literacy emphasizes the importance and increasing acceptance of qualitative research including ethnographies and case studies. They see that the ethical turn they identify has been influenced strongly by academic feminism (xxi).

Quite clearly empirical researchers within rhetoric and composition have, over the years, become increasingly aware of the dangers of uncritical acceptance of the methods of the sciences and the social sciences in the study of reading and writing. Emulation of scientific methods can lead to reductive conceptions of language and to unwarranted conclusions. Also, scientifically oriented composition research, originally embraced, in part at least, as a defense against its nemesis, literary studies, is losing its effectiveness as literary theorists influenced by postmodern critiques of Enlightenment rationality have begun to question the authority of scientific claims. Identifications intended to enhance the field's status can result, ironically, in increased vulnerability.

TRANSACTIONALISM/INTERACTIONALISM

One way in which the field has resisted scientistic and positivistic approaches to the study of writing is through the development of transactional or interactional theories, approaches that are related to Rosenblatt's transactionalism discussed in the previous chapter.⁸ Such approaches, if not actually postmodern, prepare the way for the development of nonfoundational conceptions of reading, writing, and teaching. In Rhetoric and Reality Berlin divides work in rhetoric into three categories: objective, subjective, and transactional. According to Berlin, objective rhetorics are based on positivistic epistemologies, and the dominant form is current-traditional rhetoric. The objective perspective emphasizes that the writer attempts to perceive reality with impartiality. In this view, truth is seen as being located first in nature and as existing prior to language (8). Objective rhetorics make patterns of arrangement and superficial correctness the main ends of writing instruction (9). Subjective theories, in contrast, according to Berlin, locate truth either within the individual or within a realm that is accessible only through the individual's internal apprehension (11). In this view, truth transcends the material realm, is attainable through a solitary vision, and resists expression (12). Berlin associates subjective theories with Romanticism and with Freudian psychology and sees the pedagogical approaches of keeping journals and of peer editing as arising out of a subjective orientation (14).

The transactional approach arises out of the interaction of the elements of the rhetorical situation, subject, object, audience, and language operating simultaneously (15). Berlin identifies three forms of transactional rhetoric in the twentieth century: classical, cognitive, and epistemic. If the emphasis in the transactional view sometimes appears to be on the individual, according to Berlin, the individual is conceived of as inherently transactional, arriving at truth through a transaction with the surrounding environment (16). The epistemic approach emphasizes that interlocutor, audience, and the material world are all regarded as verbal constructs (16). It emphasizes, further, that all experiences including scientific and logical ones are grounded in language (16). Berlin associates epistemic transactionalism with the work of Kenneth Burke, Richard Rorty, Hayden White, and Michel Foucault (17).

Berlin's objectivist rhetoric is related to modern approaches within the humanities that reflect the belief in the possibility of arriving at objective knowledge through the scientific method or through legal processes of adjudication of evidence. Objectivist rhetoric sometimes becomes positivistic when the observer is seen as having no effect on that which is being observed. Berlin's subjectivist rhetoric is related to antimodern approaches within the humanities that deny the possibility of objective knowledge and place emphasis on the uniqueness of the individual and on dimensions of experience that cannot be measured or quantified. His transactional rhetoric anticipates postmodernism within the humanities with its denial of the foundations that objectivity and subjectivity are based on and its affirmation of the nonfoundational and contingent nature of knowledge. The taxonomy he develops in Rhetoric and Reality is useful because it suggests that all three traditions have been and continue to be influential within rhetoric and composition.

Berlin develops his ideas more fully in Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures, using the term social-epistemic rhetoric rather than transactionalism and making clearer the relationship between social-epistemic rhetoric and postmodern thought. He observes that all language use is inherently interpretive, but he emphasizes that the language user is not a unified, coherent, and sovereign subject who can transcend language (86). He insists that language is ineluctably involved in power and politics (86). Berlin concludes his chapter on social-epistemic rhetoric by observing that students must come to see that the languages they are expected to speak, write, and embrace “are never disinterested, always bringing with them structures on the existent, the good, the possible, and the resulting regimes of power” (93).

What Berlin calls objectivism, Louise Phelps in Composition as a Human Science calls scientism, positivism, or strong empiricism. Positivism, according to Phelps, sees knowledge as based on two kinds of proofs: sense data and universal reason (9). The world is seen as independent of the perspective of the observer, and science is seen as value free and “objective” (10). Contextualism, in contrast, according to Phelps, is intersubjectivist, an interpretive science, and is rooted in hermeneutics (22). Science is seen as a rhetorical practice. Contextualism escapes subjectivism or imprisonment within closed, virtual language by restoring the possibility of reference through discourse (25). Phelps makes it clear that contextualism is a postmodern perspective.

Thomas Kent in Paralogic Rhetoric also moves interactionalism in the direct of postmodernism. He identifies paralogic rhetoric as a theory of communicative interaction, a term that derives from philosopher Donald Davidson's work and assumes that communication is a thoroughly hermeneutic act that cannot be converted into a logical framework or system of social conventions that determines the meaning of an utterance (x). Kent develops the approach in Paralogic Rhetoric, arguing that language conventions do not control the production and reception of discourse but instead are established through the give-and-take of communicative interaction (x). Kent's perspective works against the idea that disciplinary communities produce relatively stable and static conventions that can be codified and then imitated. It also works against the idea that any totalizing system can explain the language act, and Kent sees that one of the most powerful foundational elements in contemporary rhetorical study is the notion of convention (24). He emphasizes that pedagogies that emphasizes teaching students rhetorical conventions are limited because learning these elements does not ensure that students can produce effective discourse (47). He explains that the hermeneutic act operates much like open-ended dialogue. Writing and reading cannot be separated from the dialogic interaction in which any specific act of writing and reading takes place (48). Kent says, “The most fundamental activity of discourse production is the hermeneutic act: the interpretive guess we must make about our hearer's or reader's code that occurs even before invention becomes possible” (38).

Theories of interaction, while emphasizing fluidity and change, also attempt to account for regularity. They therefore do not preclude discussions of genre. The work of Mikhail Bakhtin has been influential in the development of interactional accounts of genre, and Kent draws heavily on Bakhtin's essay “The Problem of Speech Genres” in developing his theory of “paralogic genres.” Kent emphasizes that a genre is a public construct rather than an internal transcendental category (128). He says that a genre never stands as a synchronic category outside the concrete reality of communicative interaction and cannot be reduced to a set of conventional elements that function together as a structural or organic whole (140). He sees a genre as “an open-ended and uncodifiable strategy for hermeneutic guessing that comes into being through triangulation or what Bakhtin formulates as open-ended dialogue” (128). A genre, according to Kent, is defined by its response to other utterances and not by its conventional formal elements (143).

Interactional approaches to writing move in the direction of postmodern ones by emphasizing the necessary interconnectedness of subject and object without claiming that the two become fused or indistinct. Interactionalists see writing as taking place within a rich context that is charged politically and that is open ended and dynamic rather than closed. Writer and reader make momentary contact in a situation that involves struggle and interanimation with other readers, writers, and texts. In emphasizing the social dimensions of writing, they prepare the way for considerations of writing that take into account gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other factors.

EMERGENT POSTMODERN-FEMINIST RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION

As I make clear in chapter 1, rhetoric and composition is beginning to develop postmodern-feminist approaches to reading, writing, and teaching in the form of alternatives to modern positivism and scientism that do not necessitate rejecting scientific approaches entirely. Perusal of recent books and journal articles provides evidence of the emergence of such approaches. Two manifestations of this change are an increasing concern for ethical issues and disruption of traditional forms of academic discourse through an emphasis on autobiographical writing. These developments, which parallel developments in a number of other fields, are sometimes called the ethical turn and the autobiographical turn.

Feminist researchers in rhetoric and composition are beginning to explore the ethical dimensions of research—the rights and responsibilities of researchers and research subjects. This work recognizes that research necessarily involves intervention as well as observation and that work in rhetoric and composition frequently makes use of human subjects. Rather than conceiving of the researcher as a neutral observer, this work defines the researcher as necessarily partial, interested, biased, and engaged. The challenge, then, is to observe research subjects while treating them fairly and ethically. Some possibilities for ensuring that observations are fair and ethical are increasing the number of observers, increasing the number of observations, including descriptions of the research process in reports of research findings, qualifying conclusions, and including reflective narratives in research reports. Some possibilities for ensuring that research subjects are treated fairly and ethically include obtaining their consent if their work is quoted, obtaining their consent on the use of their material or their ideas as expressed in interviews on research reports, collaborating with them on research projects, including them in on research designs, and asking for their input on research reports.⁹

The autobiographical turn involves including personal narrative in otherwise impersonal discourse. Examples of disruptions of traditional academic discourse by postmodern feminists are abundant¹⁰ as are the ways in which that discourse is disrupted. Dialogues, conversations, and interviews take the place of or are woven into argumentative or expository prose. First-person narratives are interspersed with third-person observation. Genres such as poetry and prose are interspersed. The visual aspects of texts take on increasing importance, and texts and graphics are juxtaposed in creative ways as are electronic media and print media.

Rhetoric and composition is beginning to find postmodern alternatives to unhealthy identification with fields more powerful than itself and is less reliant on association with other fields to confer authority on its work. Appropriations from other fields are being made carefully and critically in order to prevent asking inappropriate questions, employing inappropriate methods, and embracing perspectives that leave the field vulnerable in the face of persistent challenges by literary theorists and others. As Kirsch and Mortensen emphasize in their introduction to Ethics and Representation in Qualitative Studies of Literacy. “A desirable critical conversation about qualitative research and its theoretical underpinnings cannot be borrowed from other disciplines; the conversation must begin with and be sustained by scholars in composition studies themselves” (xx). Kirsch and Mortensen are by no means advocating that qualitative work in other fields be ignored. Rather, they are calling for discussions of qualitative research methods that have a critical edge, and such discussions must begin with issues directly pertinent to rhetoric and composition. Because the field of rhetoric and composition is more interdisciplinary than most, because its subject is discourse itself, because it understands feminization and marginalization all too well, and because it is finding alternatives to its modern research methods and assumptions, it has the potential to become a leader within the academy.

In chapter 7, I focus on pedagogical concerns, suggesting that postmodern-feminist pedagogical approaches are useful in developing ways of dealing with student resistance in both the literature and the composition classroom. The pedagogical strategies that have arisen out of modern-feminist and antimodern-feminist approaches, I suggest, are not sufficient to deal with the complexities of the contemporary academy. They generally do not address changing demographics that necessitate an understanding of multiple cultures, nor do they generally take into consideration students' often conservative political views that make conflict in the feminist classroom almost inevitable.

Notes

1. There is ample evidence that rhetoric and composition has been marginalized within English studies. The Modern Language Association of America (MLA) has for years been dominated by literary specialists. There have been a number of attempts to include rhetoricians and compositionists in the conversation of MLA including the creation of the Division on the History and Theory of Rhetoric and Composition and the creation of a book series that includes works on composition such as Patricia Harkin and John Schilb's Contending with Words and John Clifford and Schilb's Writing Theory and Critical Theory. Given, though, that the 1998 PMLA Directory lists sixty-nine divisions devoted to literary topics and only two devoted to rhetoric and composition (the Division on the History and Theory of Rhetoric and Composition and the Division on the Teaching of Writing), there hardly seems to have been a major shift in emphasis within the organization.

2. An article by Allison Schneider in the 28 May 1999 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education speaks of composition professors at public colleges being at the bottom of the salary spectrum in 1998-99, earning an average of ＄41,164 (A14). Law and finance professors were at the top of the scale whereas faculty in language and literature averaged ＄49,478.

3. For an early investigation of the relationship between literary studies and composition studies, see Winifred Bryan Horner, ed. Composition and Literature: Bridging the Gap. As the title suggests, the essays attempt to bridge the gap between composition studies and literary studies, and so conflict between the two fields is not a central focus. James Slevin in “Depoliticizing and Politicizing Composition Studies,” an essay in The Politics of Writing Instruction, speaks of the “despicable inequality” that characterizes the profession of rhetoric and composition (2) and of the continuing “misuse of graduate students and part-time faculty” (15). Robert J. Connors in “Rhetoric in the Modern University: The Creation of an Underclass,” an essay in the same volume, documents the marginalization of rhetoric within the modern university and of the creation of a “cadre of graduate assistants, low-level instructors, part-timers, and departmental fringe people who became the permanent composition underclass” (65). For an analysis of the “contingent labor” in composition, see Eileen Schell, Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers. See also Schell, “Conference on the Growing Use of Part-time/Adjunct Faculty: Reflections from NCTE Participants.” James A. Berlin speaks in Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures of the absence of the story of rhetoric in historical accounts of the history of English studies such as Arthur N. Applebee's Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English and Gerald Graff's Professing Literature (xiii) and speaks of its history of marginalization (xiv).

   John Clifford and John Schilb's edited volume, Writing Theory and Critical Theory, emphasizes connections between theories that inform both composition studies and literary studies, though there is evidence of conflicts between the two fields in essays in the collection such as David R. Shumway's “Science, Theory, and the Politics of Empirical Studies.” Peter Elbow in What Is English? addresses the problem of the conflict between the two fields, especially in his chapter, “The Question of Literature.” Elbow is clearly an advocate for composition studies and argues that “literature is not some different special entity but just one among many forms of discourse or language” (99). Theresa Enos in Gender Roles and Faculty Lives in Rhetoric and Composition speaks of respondents to her survey observing that literature specialists are the biggest danger to writing faculty (39).

4. For a perspective on the situation, see Linda Brodkey's “Making a Federal Case out of difference: The Politics of Pedagogy, Publicity, and Postponement” in Clifford and Schilb's Writing Theory and Critical Theory, Ben W. McClelland's “A Writing Program Administrator's Response,” Mark Andrew Clark's “Topic or Pedagogy?”, and Patricia Harkin's “Narrating Conflict” in the same volume.

5. Ellen L. Barton points out in “Empirical Studies in Composition,” however, that Hairston in her 1985 essay, “Breaking Our Bonds and Reaffirming Our Connections,” makes clear her commitment to humanistic research when she says, “It's important, however, for us to realize that ours is a humanistic discipline, and that we cannot yield to what Lewis Thomas calls ‘physics envy,’ the temptation to seek status by doing only empirical experiments that can be objectively normed and statistically validated” (279).

6. The language Linda Flower uses in her introduction to Reading-to-Write: Exploring a Cognitive and Social Process places considerably greater emphasis on the interpretive process of the writer/researcher: “The individual writer/researcher must define the heart of the question as he or she sees it, must draw the inferences that create a pattern of meaning, and must test that meaning against other possible ones. Research and writing of this sort are what an individual mind makes of its context” (11).

7. Feminist analyses of science have arisen recently out of a number of fields. See, for instance, Nancy Tuana, ed. Feminism and Science and Tuana, The Less Noble Sex.

8. I am assuming a close correspondence between transactionalism and interactionalism. Berlin in Rhetoric and Reality shows how “transactional” is different from objectivist and subjectivist approaches to rhetoric. Keith Gilyard in Voices of the Self uses the term transactional to describe a tradition “in which humans are viewed as continually negotiating with an evolving environment” (13). As I indicated in chapter 5, Louise M. Rosenblatt in The Reader, the Text, the Poem uses the term transactional within the context of the reading of literature. Rosenblatt borrows the term from Dewey and in so doing maintains, to an extent, Dewey's modernist conception of the merging of subject and object. Rosenblatt in “Viewpoints: Transaction Versus Interaction” explains that the term transactional suggests that the observer, the observing, and the observed are part of a total situation whereas the term interaction suggests separable elements or entities acting on one another, a mechanistic rather than a fluid process (98). Within an interactional perspective, however, subject and object do not merge but, rather, maintain their separate identities. The term transaction can be problematic because it can be confused with the category used to describe writing to communicate with others in James Britton's taxonomy, a category that Britton and his colleagues see as opposed to expressive writing.

9. For a useful, feminist perspective on ethics, see Gesa E. Kirsch, Ethical Dilemmas.

10. I discuss the autobiographical turn in rhetoric and composition in “Elbow's Radical and Postmodern Politics.”