Subversive Complicity and Basic Writing Across the Curriculum

Abstract

What follows is a simple assertion: time for basic writing to get out from under, a call for us to inculcate a Basic Writing Across the Curriculum. It is time yet again to move away from the concept that basic writers are in need of remedies, in part because all compo- sition courses are in some sense remedial, and to a greater degree because the illness that we seek to remedy is in being at least discursively other-cultural. Within this essay there are reflections, speculations, considerations of how to go about what is demanded of us—encul- turation and assimilation—while doing what it is we believe we ought to do—promote critical consciousness, something that many of us in many disciplines seek to do, even if those in other disciplines are unaware of the term.