also capitulates to a preoccupation of process with the student-writer. Spellmeyer attempts to resolve the contradiction between educating students for mastery and educating them for citizenship by nominating the essay as his genre-of-choice and presuming that the essay resides in some privileged and unmarked social and political space that students can unproblematically appropriate for their own ends. Finally, Trimbur endorses Bizzell’s self-understanding, which she achieves through a critical review of her own work, that no method and no meta-discourse can successfully bring students to critical consciousness. Trimbur agrees with Bizzell that we must recognize the limitations of the prison-house of language and unapologetically assume the attendant responsibility to promote what we ethically view as the common good.
Countering Trimbur and the many who adopted Trimbur’s position, Debra Jacobs argues that regardless of its limitations, “losing sight of writing as a process can lead to impoverishing the process of critical inquiry” (673). She admits, however, her discomfort “with the risk I take in advancing an allegiance to what [process] has been so thoroughly critiqued that its limitations can readily be rehearsed by anyone who is even modestly acquainted with recent composition scholarship” (663–64). Nevertheless, Jacobs does take issue with Trimbur and his review, not for the critique and resolution he offers, but with his recommendation of the notion post-process, which is bought with what she views as an essentialist characterization of process theory and classroom practice. Furthermore, she admonishes those advocates of post-process who conflate process theory with expressivism and call upon dated process theory from the 1970s and early 1980s to construct a straw man merely for the sake of dismissing it.
In her 2001 essay published in JAC, Jacobs responds to three articles—Candace Spigelman’s “What Role Virtue?,” Thomas Rickert’s “‘Hands Up, You’re Free’: Composition in a Post-Oedipal World,” and Anthony Petruzzi’s “Kairotic Rhetoric in Freire’s Liberatory Pedagogy.” She concedes that she takes liberties in applying the ideas in these three articles, particularly those of Rickert, to pedagogy in general and to process theory in particular since the three do not share the same views. Nevertheless, she defends doing so on the grounds that unless we conceive the classroom only as a space for “happenings,” we are forced to theorize classroom practice (666). The purpose of her response is to “reexamine process theory and pedagogy in light of some common characteristics of the liberatory pedagogy” all three writers, she says, “point toward” (663). In the estimation of Jacobs, the characteristics the writers identify in their formulations of a critical or liberatory pedagogy not only “resonate” with but also “enrich” her understanding of writing as process (663).
Both Spigelman and Rickert address the rub between emancipatory pedagogies and the disciplinary and institutional authority that undermines them. For Spigelman, problems occur as teachers attempt to intervene in students’ critical and ethical development, but her position is that teachers still have a responsibility to exercise such interventions. Rickert advocates a post-pedagogy that promotes and values “transformative acts of transgression” (Jacobs 663). But Jacobs believes Rickert’s post-pedagogy is actually a “non-pedagogy,” since his post-pedagogy of the act would “refuse accommodation entirely in favor of a radical abandonment” (qtd. in Jacobs 666). Petruzzi, in his attempt to theorize a Freirean version of “critical consciousness as a rhetorical concept,” understands passivity and accommodation from a phenomenological perspective, as comprising an individual’s doxa (commonsensical, passive, and unexamined knowledge) to which new knowledge is added and subsequently assimilated. In his view, then, both quotidian (stream of consciousness) and critical consciousness are situated in the “same hermeneutic circle” and are thus “co-implicated with critical consciousness in processual acts of cognition” (663).
Jacobs believes all three writers strive for an emancipatory moment achieved through transvaluation. To achieve this, however, an intervention must occur. Jacobs says that process theory offers us the possibility for such disruptive interventions. If process theory has been reduced to disciplinary doxa, she says, then it is our responsibility to disrupt it through interventions such as asking “new and better questions” (617). Jacobs thus chooses to enlarge process to accommodate the goal of critical inquiry she shares with Trimbur and other social/cultural scholars.
The entrance of the post-process moniker into rhetoric and composition (1994) clearly did not reference the paralogic hermeneutic theory or paralogic rhetoric of Kent (1989–1993). Additionally, post-process, as originally coined, clearly assumed a provenance of scholarship synonymous with that of the social/cultural turn. This assumption did not go uncontested, as evidenced in Jacobs’s contention that critical inquiry cannot be effectively practiced without a viable theory of process.
Post-Process Scholarship and the Social/Cultural Turn
This third space of post-process is where most who self-identify as post-process reside, making it the most heterogeneous of all post-process spaces. However, an examination of post-process scholarship that lays claim to the social/cultural turn of the mid-1980s forward reveals two major post-process strands. One includes those who may self-identify as post-process but who do not necessarily ground that identity in Kent’s theory of paralogic hermeneutics. The other strand self-identifies as post-process but appropriates from Kent’s theory only specific concepts, which are then mediated in degree from his strong version. In the following section, I consider these two strands in turn in order to clarify and contrast them.
Strand One Post-Process, Comprised of Those Who May Self-Identify as Post-Process but Who Do Not Necessarily Partake of Kent’s Theory
This strand of post-process includes some of those who likely self-identify as post-process but whose scholarship does not foreground the term. They might be said, therefore, to harbor a post-process sensibility of the type described earlier: generational and/or disaffected. This sensibility is informed at the very least by a tacit critique of process, as well as by the assumption that the advent of post-process coincides with the mid-1980s scholarship of the social/cultural turn.
Designating scholarship into this category is problematic if only because some whose scholarship I include might well take issue with their inclusion. To mitigate this difficulty, I restrict coverage to one edited collection, with the assumption that the contributors share, to some degree, the sensibility if not the position of the collection’s editor, Joseph Petraglia. The edited collection to which I allude is Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction, published in 1995. It is in his introduction that Petraglia illustrates his particular post-process sensibility and position.
Petraglia writes that the focus of the collection is the acronym GWSI (general writing skills instruction), which he defines as “the general ability to develop and organize ideas, use techniques for inventing topics worthy of investigation, adapt one’s purpose to an audience, and anticipate reader response” (xi). According to Petraglia, GWSI characterizes almost all contemporary writing curricula in most composition courses, with the exception of those such as basic writing, technical writing, writing-intensive content courses, and creative writing, all of which have their own “specialized content and limited rhetorical scope” (xii). These latter, content-rich, and rhetorically situated courses contrast sharply with the intention of the GWSI course, which, he says, is to give students skills that, ostensibly, teach them “‘to write,’” with the assumption that these skills transcend any context or content (xii). Moreover, Petraglia says that GWSI is not any straw man since it is the curriculum taught by the majority of teachers, the curriculum that almost all composition textbooks endorse, and the curriculum for which English departments garner considerable resources. Because GWSI is synonymous with writing instruction itself for many in the discipline, Petraglia concedes that questioning the legitimacy of GWSI is tantamount to questioning the discipline itself.
As I have indicated, the degree to which contributors to the collection share Petraglia’s view varies, but all offer some critique of GWSI. Broadly, these critiques revolve around a variety of queries regarding GWSI: whether it is “intellectually defensible,” given what we now know about what it
