Basic Writing. George Otte
and his account of this episode added special force to his ongoing argument against the easy labeling of remedial students—especially unexamined constructions of them as insufficiently developed or intelligent or literate and above all when so construed by high-stakes, single-shot assessments. His accounts of the students he knew as a caseworker were similarly multidimensional, offering a rich sense of their ethnic backgrounds, their economic and educational difficulties, their often untapped strengths.
Lives was the academic equivalent of a blockbuster. A few years after its publication, Mark Wiley was writing that it met with
deservedly unequivocal praise. In fact, the book’s overwhelmingly positive reception suggests that Rose managed to do what no one else has so far been able to accomplish: to get everybody to agree on something. In this case, it is the power and eloquence of Lives to validate and reaffirm the potential of America’s underclass, those who have much to offer but who inevitably slip through the (I think rather large) cracks of the educational system and who in the process become the system’s casualties. These are the students who are consigned to the lower tracks, who are labeled “remedial” and sometimes harshly judged as “uneducable.”
If it’s possible to imagine a canon for composition, Rose’s book, I suspect, would be a unanimous choice. (529)
Actually, Wiley said as much in responding to someone who might dissent from that unanimity. His “Building a Rose Garden: A Response to John Trimbur” (1993) points to an exception in the “unequivocal praise” Lives met with. Trimbur, in “Articulation Theory and the Problem of Determination: A Reading of Lives on the Boundary” (1993), had not disputed the enormous popularity of Rose’s book but had worried about its cause: for Trimbur, it was too much the conventional success story, a kind of academic variant on Horatio Alger. But he concluded in the book’s favor, reckoning that Rose had used the conventional frame to appeal to a wider audience with an important message.
Rose’s Lives did, in any case, usher in the great decade of literacy narratives—autobiographical accounts of educational development and watershed moments in the acquisition of language and literacy. What’s more, it helped to focus attention on both sides of the watershed for underprepared students: not just the confrontation with academic culture but also the home culture that sustained identity formation. In this it was complemented by “Arts of the Contact Zone” (1991), in which Mary Louise Pratt argued that different discourses grounded in different cultures should find a place for meeting and even mediation in the classroom. This was an invitation for teachers and students to negotiate racial and ethnic as well as cultural differences. Soon other work encouraging this type of negotiation began to appear. Keith Gilyard’s Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence was published in 1991 and received an American Book Award in 1992. Gilyard looks at studies in Black English, bidialectalism, and code-switching in light of his own experience. Another influential literacy narrative was Victor Villanueva’s Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color (1993). At this time, an interest in the literacy stories of students began to infuse classroom practices as well (see Patthey-Chavez and Gergen; Lu, “Conflict”).
The richness of these literacy narratives began to engender an anxiety of influence. Perhaps the most influential of the pioneering work, that done by Mina Shaughnessy—now almost canonical for many in basic writing—had overgeneralized and oversimplified the basic writer. In the early 1990s, Min-Zhan Lu launched the first major salvo in her campaign to realign the origins and direction of basic writing: “Redefining the Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy: A Critique of the Politics of Linguistic Innocence” (1991). In this essay, Lu maintained that by focusing so heavily on “error,” Shaughnessy was isolating language from meaning and, at the same time, minimizing the significance of cultural and linguistic differences. Not long after, her extension of this argument, “Conflict and Struggle,” appeared in the same issue of College English as Paul Hunter’s “‘Waiting for Aristotle’” (1992), his analysis of the 1980 issue of the Journal of Basic Writing published as a memorial to Shaughnessy—an issue, he argued, that defined her contribution so as to co-opt it for conservative ends. The response was an unprecedented six-author “Symposium on Basic Writing” (1993) in the next volume of College English. Four authors—including a co-worker of Shaughnessy’s and an open admissions student who had gone on to become a professor—charged Lu and Hunter with decontextualizing and misrepresenting the historical and philosophical foundations of basic writing; Lu and Hunter responded to these charges.
The call for more careful historicizing of BW took an ironic turn not long thereafter with Bruce Horner’s “Discoursing Basic Writing” (1996). Horner, a colleague and frequent coauthor of Lu’s, argued that the representation of basic writing even and especially by its advocates had been decontextualized, cut off from the social realities that forged it; he called for a recuperative, alternative history. Meanwhile, finding Lu’s critique of Shaughnessy a misrepresentation of BW’s seminal figure, Jane Maher embarked on her biography of Shaughnessy, itself not only a recuperative act but also a countermove whose motivations she discussed in a JBW article (“Writing the Life”). More recently, Brian Ray, writing in 2008 and representing a new generation of BW scholars, reassessed the debate of the 1990s from a fresh perspective, arguing that when viewed through Donald Davidson’s concept of linguistic charity (as articulated by Kevin Porter in “A Pedagogy of Charity: Donald Davidson and the Student-Negotiated Composition Classroom”) the views of Shaughnessy and Lu are really not so far apart.
To return to the debate as it surfaced in the 1990s, about the same time that Shaughnessy’s legacy was being critically reassessed, something else occurred that would lead to debates about the future of basic writing. In 1992 the fourth (and, to date, the last) National Conference on Basic Writing was held in College Park, Maryland. It featured David Bartholomae as the plenary speaker and focused on the theme “Critical Issues in Basic Writing: How Are We, Our Writing Programs, and Our Institutions Meeting or Failing to Meet the Needs of At-Risk Students?” The way Bartholomae chose to answer that question would have enormous impact on the field. At that point, early signs were that enriched perspectives could and would breed enriched pedagogy. In addition to the powerful personal narratives of scholars like Rose, Gilyard, and Villanueva that gave personal depth and cultural complexity to a field increasingly unhappy with pat labels and neat placements, there was the considerable success of Bartholomae’s own program at the University of Pittsburgh, documented in Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts. That 1986 book had been followed by Bartholomae’s ascension to the leadership of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in 1988. The Pittsburgh program had been widely praised and adopted. In his plenary speech, Bartholomae recounted the success story:
[T]his is a story I love to tell. It is convenient. It is easy to understand. Like basic writing, it (the story) and I are produced by the grand narrative of liberal sympathy and liberal reform. The story is inscribed in a master narrative of outreach, of equal rights, of empowerment, of new alliances and new understandings, of the transformation of the social text, the American university, the English department. I would like, in the remainder of my talk, to read against the grain of that narrative—to think about how and why and where it might profitably be questioned. I am not, let me say quickly, interested in critique for the sake of critique; I think we have begun to rest too comfortably on terms that should make us nervous, terms like “basic writing.” Basic writing has begun to seem like something naturally, inevitably, transparently there in the curriculum, in the stories we tell ourselves about English in America. It was once a provisional, contested term, marking an uneasy accommodation between the institution and its desires and a student body that did not or would not fit. I think it should continue to mark an area of contest, of struggle, including a struggle against its stability or inevitability. (“Tidy House” 6)
Bartholomae was by no means alone in this struggle. When Bill Bernhardt and Peter Miller, who had succeeded Lynn Quitman Troyka as editors of the Journal of Basic Writing, approached Bartholomae about publishing his keynote, he suggested that they consider including other presentations as well. They did. The resulting Spring 1993 issue of JBW is a rich re-examination of basic writing as a field—but a highly critical one, not afraid to suggest that BW as an enterprise may be fundamentally misguided. With the help of hindsight, the issue seems a checklist of the misgivings and concerns about basic writing that would become increasingly