College Composition & Communication - Volume 49, Issue 2, 1998

I began this essay by setting forth a problem that too often, I believe, accompanies a cultural studies approach to writing instruction-namely, the perception among students that cultural critique is a privileged, elitist mode of inquiry, one that is largely indifferent to, if not contemptuous of, those it presumably seeks to enlighten or liberate. I then argued that a dialogic, specifically Bakhtinian approach to response could help us address this problem, and offered a discussion of how two Bakhtinian concepts-anacrisis and the superaddressee-might be applied to our writing classrooms. Underlying what I have attempted here is my belief that cultural critique needs dialogue to restrain its tendencies for authoritarian pronouncements, for "last word" truisms and disabling certainties… . (Farmer 204).

[W]hen something becomes as “common sensical” as the idea that students should own their own writing has, we need to take a step back from examining how ownership is removed or restored and look at the idea itself since there is a possibility that it reflects those dominant beliefs and values, but not other (non-dominant) ones. This essay begins to do that by exploring how ownership was represented in two critical “moments” in the history of composition scholarship and pedagogy that continue to wield considerable influence, the progressivism of the early 1900s and expressivism of the 1960s and 1970s. (Adler-Kassner 208-9).

In this paper I want to argue that students’ attitudes about authorship and intellectual property rights are, among other things, evidence of certain cultural "habits of mind," habits which are shaped throughout their lifetimes and which they bring to their interpretations of the writing group experience. (Spigelman 234-35).

The issue of power permeates all three collections that I am reviewing here, as it should because all grades, evaluations, and assessments-no matter how naturalistic, contextualized, multidimensional, and richly descriptive-are exercises in power. (Greenberg 277-284).