n 1986 Lester Faigley analyzed three competing theories of the writing process: the expressive, the cognitive, and the social. Although calling for a synthesis, Faigley was clearly endorsing the social view. He identified four strands of research which contributed to the social perspective he was advocating: post-structuralist theories of language, sociology of science, ethnographies of literacy and language, and Marxism. Two o these four-ethnography and Marxism-contributed texts about literacy that were instrumental in helping composition studies make what has bee called the social turn (Trimbur, Taking; Bizzell, Academic 202). Indeed the move in composition studies away from the individualistic and cognitive perspectives of the seventies and early eighties toward the social theories and political consciousness that prevail today was encouraged, pushed along, impelled by competing narratives of literacy. These days, literacythe term and concept-connects composition, with its emphasis on students and classrooms, to the social, political, economic, historical, and cultural. In thinking about the relations of literacy and composition, I have found helpful Jean-Francois Lyotard's notions of the grand narratives of modernism and the little narratives of postmodernism. Lyotard argues in Postmodern Condition that in the modern age knowledge is justified, or legitimated, through narrative. legitimacy of an idea, a work, or a proposal depends, in other words, on its contribution to one of two grand narratives. As Lyotard puts it, The mode of legitimation.. .which reintroduces narrative as the validity of knowledge, can thus take two routes, depending on whether it represents the subject of the narrative as cognitive