0 When, on his deathbed, Voltaire was called upon to renounce the devil, he is reported to have replied, This is no time for making new enemies. As someone who has moved relatively peacefully so far through more than 30 years of a working life in TESOL, I feel much the same way. And yet, the informing ethos of the reader reacts/writer responds exchange-indeed, the unspoken assumption underlying academic discourse in general-is agonistic. Academics are trained in what might be called a displacive use of language, as though making a contribution is not sufficient; someone must first be shown to be wrong or lacking (Swales, 1990). The generic patterning of this displacive discourse in the TESOL Quarterly Forum takes the form of what Nicol (2004) calls intertextual critical exchange. It typically begins with a flourish that damns the original writer with faint praise and then goes on to state the reacting reader's position. The original writer then responds in kind. Purgason, for example, declares that Edge's text, prompted me . . . to do a great deal of reflection (this issue, p. 711). She emerges from this thoughtful state not only able to reconfirm the righteousness of her own previous thinking, but also to accuse me, the author, of simplistic argument, poor scholarship, unfitting choice of words, and alarmist rhetoric, all in the name of clarification' and an effort to keep the dialogue alive.., in a less polemical tone (this issue, p. 711). As a part of her clarification, and in apparently unconscious parody of rational argument, she suggests that the interest I declare (in my author statement) in using nonjudgmental discourse should somehow disqualify me from using evaluative expressions in my writing. Griffith takes a much less aggressive tack, albeit still in displacive mode. The core of his reaction is to dismiss the doubts and ambiguities that concern me with regard to the roles of TESOL in the contemporary world and to assure readers that people in the United States will only support a war if it has some idealistic rationale and that students of English gain access not merely to a linguistic code, but to outlook, a way of being, a culture rooted in human rights (this issue, pp. 715-716).
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