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 means to be a rhetor and a writer; whether it helps students perform effectively beyond the specific course in which it is taught; whether it can continue to secure a space for rhetoric and composition in the academy and, if not, whether we ought not begin to attempt to create spaces more congenial to current theory and research (xii).
Addressing the issue of the intellectual defensibility of GWSI, some suggest that there is a paradox in how the GWSI course is constructed and conducted in its disciplinary and institutional space and what we now commonly acknowledge as part of our disciplinary knowledge about writing. This disciplinary knowledge is abstracted by Lil Brannon:
The act of writing is a complex sociocognitive interaction with the world that entails, beyond mechanical control, such subtle practices as establishing and maintaining social positions, adapting to variable discursive conventions, and constructing ideas and relationships for oneself and others. It is not separate from one’s life or from one’s culture. Our [. . .] responsibility then [is] to ensure not that students receive some essentially alien technology, some “correct” set of language practices, in order to proceed through the university, but rather that they learn to use, with greater subtlety and control, the language they bring with them, adjusting the register, the cadences, the vocabulary, the social codes, the nuances, and the intellectual moves, as they confront the demands of writing. (240–41)
In light of what this passage represents about our disciplinary understanding of writing, contributors find the GWSI classroom, as constructed in this edited collection, to be deficient.
For example, Dan Royer maintains that the rhetorical situation of the GWSI course cannot accommodate the range of student experience needed for a genuine practice of invention. He also believes, however, that the course can be improved with a new theory of invention as guided phenomenology, which he articulates. David Kaufer and Patricia Dunmire address the lack of content in the GWSI course and offer a course they developed and based on Sylvia Scribner’s notion of knowledge design for teaching analysis and analytic writing. To address his criticism of the theoretical thinness of the GWSI course, David Jolliffe recommends we reconsider the multivocal and interreferential nature of discourse. With his critique that the GWSI course is not so much bad pedagogy as pedagogy effective at producing “the wrong results,” Fred Kemp recommends a postmodern-informed pedagogy based on electronic texts, which he believes would offer us a way to literally rethink what it means to write (181).
Others, however, are not so optimistic regarding the potential of reform. David Russell studies the course as a paradoxical activity system that attempts to teach writing as part of activity systems of which neither teachers nor students are actually part. For writing to have genuine meaning and purpose, it must occur within the complexity and richness that can only be offered, he says, by a specific activity system (“Activity Theory and Its Implications”). Aviva Freedman’s research on genre echoes this idea. Her findings indicate that students acquire the discipline-specific features of genres routinely taught in GWSI classrooms in their content courses without resort to either models or to explicit teaching. Furthermore, not only does the explicit teaching of the underlying rules of genre in the GWSI classroom fail to facilitate learning, Freedman says, it often impedes it. Petraglia concurs, writing that formal instruction of genre conventions and principles may well be “counterproductive.” Such instruction