Abstract

Writing theory and pedagogy seek to play a crucial role in American society, as evidenced by efforts to make writing central to the search for knowledge, the creation of meaning, the activity of emancipation, the process of empowerment, and the future of democracy. ;This study undertakes a critique of these commitments, arguing that they work to align composition theory and teaching with the project of modernity, or the Enlightenment. This study applies the terms of the critique of the Enlightenment to a critique of the theorization of writing in America, the purpose of which is not to better equip the profession to realize its goals of enlightenment, emancipation, and empowerment, but to introduce a different sensibility into our thinking about writing. ;Chapter I, "Composition in America," locates composition theory in the Enlightenment through an analysis of its overriding commitment to the epistemological project of theory. The discussion focuses on the way that composition conducts itself as a theoretical enterprise. ;Chapter II, "The Question Concerning Invention," argues that, in its approach to invention, composition theory aligns itself with the philosophical discourse of modernity. Martin Heidegger's various critiques of science and technology provide the terms for this critique, with his major treatise, Being and Time, providing the terms for an alternative approach to invention, one that recasts writing in a Pre-socratic sense of "art," or techne. ;Chapter III, "The Pathos of Dispositio," argues that writing theory must develop one of two versions of arrangement, based on the twentieth-century linguistic turn in intellectual history. One version develops from Jurgen Habermas's theory of "universal pragmatics," which seeks justice in the Enlightenment dream of rationality; the other, from Jean-Francois Lyotard's "postmodern pragmatics of paganism," which seeks justice in local and transient arrangements of knowledge and power. ;Chapter IV and V, "Style is the Woman" and "Remembering the Body, Delivering the Other," respectively, focus on American and French feminist interventions in discourse and argue that, because of the prior commitment of composition to the epistemological project of modernity, composition is likely to misread a "feminine" practice of writing and thus remain a phallocentric enterprise