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Anne,

Maybe if I give you some touchstones, that will help you follow some of the leaps I've made in the course of our discussion.

There's a theoretical dimension to this, which you can pursue most economically by looking at my discussions of Foucault's "genealogy" and de Certeau's notion of "use" in my book. De Certeau's entire discussion of rhetorical tactics vs. philosophical strategy helped to organize my thinking about modern and ancient cynics. Seeing rhetoric as a medium for verbal action rather than verbal noodling or useless contemplation became central for my view of cynicism, as well as my view of the classroom.

The historical dimension, for my purposes anyway, comes from the epistemic break that occurs around the time of the seventeenth-century discovery of scientific method (cf. Bacon, Hobbes, etc.), the denial of rhetoric as the master-science of persuasion, and the emergence of the disciplines out of the fragments of a once-unified domain of rhetoric. Bender and Wellbery's essay on "rhetoricality" claims that this shift created a new, anti-rhetorical paradigm of transparent communication for Enlightenment readers and writers. This kind of understanding of the Enlightenment and its paradigms of communication has long been part of our understanding of the historical emergence of print culture. So I am very interested in the historical relations between rhetoric and disciplinarity.

Finally, as someone who teaches in an institution with an extremely wide range of students, with very diverse backgrounds and capabilities, my biggest concern is about constructing the kinds of frameworks of understanding that will enable some kind of discussion to take place. When I teach my Swift and Literary Studies course, for example, I am not worried about creating agreement about a particular interpretation of Swift, but want to show them the various kinds of arguments, issues, and disagreements that have arisen around Swift since the time of Gulliver's Travels's publication. (this is a gateway course for majors) They must use the materials of the class to construct their own arguments for the final research paper on Swift, but they must also find their own materials for that essay. So there's focus on a single text, but I try to push them to develop their own arguments using the kinds of literary theory and secondary criticism most suitable for their point.

So a semester's worth of discussion of "satire" would be one shared context for understanding GT (often misogynist and aggressive; concealed authorship; involves sex and poop jokes; etc.), but I'm not trying to get them to repeat my paltry insights, I'm trying to get them extend their own and others' insights one step (maybe several steps) further.

I think the process of mutually refining our critical vocabularies is a collective one, and its collective nature gives students the confidence to receive and give useful criticism to one another. But my students need to learn how to bridge the distance between their respective positions. They need to learn how to articulate their differences from each other, as well as from the "standard" authorities (who are always plural and in disagreement with one another) if they are going to feel that they participated in a successful class that advanced their understanding. That's how I measure my success or failure.

Does that make sense?

DM