Writing Away from Fear: Mina Shaughnessy and the Uses of Authority

Abstract

IT IS AS UNFORTUNATE AS it was necessary that John Rouse chose Mina Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) for his most recent attack in the September 1979 issue of COLLEGE ENGLISH on composition programs (see also his Knowledge, Power, and the Teaching of English, CE, 40 [1979] for an earlier attack on James Moffet). Shaughnessy was necessary because hers is perhaps the single most important book on composition published in this decade. Rouse's attack is unfortunate, however, because it only exacerbates a growing tension, in times of economic cutbacks and demands for basic competency, between those in the profession who see themselves as inheritors of the literary tradition and as guardians of the culture, and those who, like Shaughnessy, have responded to the demands of our peculiarly technological culture and see the profession as primarily serving students by aiding their writing efforts. There need not be this tension between literature and composition; there need not have been an attack on Shaughnessy. There is ample evidence just sitting in any English classroom in the country that both activities-those of thought and generated by reflection on literature and those of writing generated by focus on composition-are sorely needed. But the attack has been made and a defense is in order, especially when one considers the rank bias Rouse brings to his reading of Shaughnessy and the unfairness in his use of her work. What we have in John Rouse's is the liberal imagination chained by its own Platonic ideals, unable (or is it unwilling?) to see that the needs of students are not always best served by invoking the shibolleths of the literary and liberal inheritance: talk of feeling and thought, of poetry as criticism of life, and the priority of the individual. Rouse's appeal is polemic, unsubstantiated by calls on experience or research; his main argument devolves to an almost ritualized liberal political caricature: the casting out of the arch-fiend, authoritarianism, from the temple of learning. One would have to think, after reading Rouse, that Mina Shaughnessy would have all students regi-