2011 was the year of my dissertation (which is almost done! really!). Way back in January, my fieldwork wrapped up and I began the long and arduous process of stepping back and thinking…what was that I just did?
This process has been undeniably aided as well as profoundly shaped by a number of books I encountered and read during the year. Here, then, is a retrospective of the 10 books that left the biggest marks over the last 12 months.
- Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth. Robert Westbrook (2005)No one studies Pragmatism and John Dewey seriously without knowing the work of intellectual historian Westbrook. His magnum opus, John Dewey and American Democracy, is required reading for anyone who has even a half interest in Pragmatism. I first worked through that behemoth the summer after I wrapped up my doctoral coursework and credit it with providing me with the base from which I survived my prelims. But Democratic Hope is something else altogether. While it draws heavily on many themes in Dewey’s biography, it does much more than that by picking up on the “rest of the story” concerning Pragmatism, Democracy, and what relevance it has to political theory today. In this, Westbrook moves beyond the historian’s role and directly enters the fray as a theorist, thinker, and philosopher. What this book did for me, though, was to illuminate a second, almost hidden thread concerning Pragmatism–a thread that has been unfortunately cast into the shadows by Richard Rorty. But it is precisely this thread that I had been needing, especially in light of the horrors that the economic downturn wrought on society. As will be evident, many of the other books on this list were books I came to from Westbrook’s work.
- A Companion to Marx’s Capital. David Harvey (2010)For a fleeting moment, I felt a little sheepish about putting a “reading guide” on this list. This book, though, needs to be mentioned for one very simple reason: the economic recession caught nearly everyone in academia off guard both with how bad it got and how long it has persisted. It occurred to me (and still occurs to me) that many of the current fashionable trends in theory simply weren’t providing any ways to understand what was/is going on. I needed more Marx. While Harvey’s work has long been on my periphery (A Brief History of Neoliberalism, The New Imperialism, The Postmodern Condition, etc), what really made this book valuable to me was the way through which Harvey positioned himself as an educator of Marx through his prose. I had read big swaths of Capital Vol. I as an undergraduate, but this encounter was rough and incomplete. Things I had been struggling to connect for some time were all of the sudden much easier to wrap my mind around after going back through Capital with Harvey offering his thoughts along the way. Importantly, rediscovering Marx’s discussion of how labor is extracted from workers has been critical for me trying to understand all the data I collected from my fieldwork. Since “Marxists” (and I mean the real kind who take Marx’s actual writings seriously) aren’t as easy to come by in academia as many people think, I honestly don’t think I could have gotten these insights out of Marx without Harvey’s book.
- Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World. Nancy Welch (2008)Welch’s book makes this list for one single example she explores in her book. During her husband’s fight with cancer, they had to write a letter of some sort so that insurance money might cover an alternative form of treatment. The request detailed in the letter kept getting denied. Obviously, this was not due to any deficiencies in the actual composition of the letter, but rather had more to do with how the world is currently structured. This insight should be earth shattering to those who work in comp/rhet. I don’t know that Welch fully and successfully completes her project (and this has been the subject of a piece that I’ve been trying to get into print lately), but it points out what we’re up against. In my own work, this has been something I’ve been noticing with some regularity, and has lead to my own shift in thinking about language and its role in society. As the General College at the University of Minnesota was being shut down, there were many in the university community who smugly looked at GC from their own garroted ivory towers and had the gall to suggest that if only supporters of GC could argue for its existence more effectively or eloquently, it would be spared. Wrong. The first decision made when the administration decided to get ride of GC was to simply not listen to any dissent at all. No language could have broken through this barrier. This is a tough pill to swallow, especially for those who tout the social power of words and writing.
- Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation. Cheryl Misak (2000)I can thank Robert Westbrook for pointing me to this book. Too much of my introduction to Pragmatism had been influenced by Rorty and James, particularly in regards to “truth” and “belief.” Misak’s book corrected this for me, by pointing me back to C. S. Peirce and the origins of that “other” Pragmatism that I, for some reason, had missed out on during my initiation to Pragmatism. It is from Peirce, not James, that Misak builds up a Pragmatist conception of “truth.” It is precisely this concept of “truth” that had been lost with Rorty, and what has hamstrung Pragmatism for so long in regards to responding to events such as the economic recession (and more broadly, the rise of an anti-democratic form of governance: neo-liberalism). Misak resurrects “truth” as something a little less than “Truth” but still as something we can use to ground action upon as well as moral, ethical, and political deliberation.
- Democracy After Liberalism: Pragmatism and Deliberative Politics. Robert Talisse (2005)By now, a pattern should be emerging. I was reading Talisse’s book at the same time I was reading Misak’s book, and the two obviously compliment each other very well, as they are both working within the same trajectory initiated by C.S. Peirce. Talisse’s book, though, has forced me to think much harder about liberalism itself–not “liberalism” in the partisan sense, but liberalism in the philosophical sense initiated by Locke. In this, Talisse navigates one of the toughest conundrums facing anyone that deals with anything regarding individuals in group settings, be it political theorists or teachers in a classroom: what happens when plural beliefs come into conflict with each other. This has been an important addition to my own work, especially in trying to understand how liberalism’s anxiety over such adjudication has often times scuttled many liberatory/emancipatory approaches to writing instruction. It also has added to my conviction that Dewey’s Liberalism and Social Action remains under-read and under-written about (although Talisse, not counting himself as a Deweyan, might disagree here). Someday, when I have the time (ha!), this is a project I would love to attend to.
- The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills. (2008)Things people seem to forget: Mills wrote his dissertation on Pragmatism. That is a fascinating read unto itself, particularly in light of how others have written the story of Pragmatism. But outside of Sociology, where his Sociological Imagination is still very much in currency (apparently?), Mills’ name seems all but absent. I don’t fully understand this. Regardless, working on a tip to check out his unpublished dissertation (posthumously published as Sociology and Pragmatism: The higher learning in America) I began to check out Mills’ writing as a public intellectual. To me, and where this volume of his shorter works is most important, Mills is the sort of “missing link” between Dewey and the progressive movement and left politics today. Characteristically, Mills pulls no punches in these works. What has been so valuable to me, though, is seeing how Mills attempts to make sense of his time, the cold war, and what a tenable “left” might be in the wake of the Stalinist Soviet Union as well as the decline of labor. Much of what Mills saw around him still defines the moment we are living in, particularly in his warnings about what happens when public deliberation over political goods ceases to be a social fact.
- Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Richard Bernstein (1983).
There were two Bernstein books that really became important to me this past year, (the other being Praxis and Action) but this one has been the more fruitful one to my own work. It is in this book that Bernstein works through the enduring agon between objectivism and relativism. This book has been so important simply because these issues just never cease to die. Crack open virtually any current issue of any academic journal in my field, and you will still see debates falling neatly along the lines that Bernstein lays out. It is uncanny, and suggests Pragmatism still has a lot to offer the field of composition studies (are you listening editors and peer-reviewers that have met my work with apathy??). This “quest for certainty” has implications that go right down to the pavement, and the inability to move beyond it has really lead to the dearth of “ground shaking” scholarship that defined composition in the 1980s and 90s. - Writing at the End of the World. Richard Miller (2005).There are things that are hard to swallow, and then there are things that are hard to swallow. In my own field, there is one seemingly omnipresent belief we grasp on to as a means to (what…) justify our own existence. This belief is that writing matters. But we don’t just mean that it matters personally, we usually mean that learning to write is somehow one of the last remaining rays of hope in an increasingly desolate world. Miller minces no words here when he writes:
“The dark night of the soul for literacy workers comes with the realization that training students to read, write, and talk in more critical and self-reflective ways cannot protect them from the violent changes our culture is undergoing. Hellen Keller learning to see the world through a language traced into the palm of her hand; Malcom X in prison memorizing the dictionary word by word; Paul Freire moving among the illiterate masses in Brazil: we tell ouserlves and our students over and over again about the power of reading and writing while the gap between rich and poor grows greater, the twin towers come crashing down, and somewhere some other group of angry young men is at work silently stockpiling provisions for the next apocalypse. [...] if you’re in the business of teaching others how to read and write with care, there’s no escaping the sense that your labor is increasingly irrelevant” (5).
This sentiment has been echoed before, notably by J. Elspeth Stuckey in 1990 and later Robert Yagelski in 2000. No one, though, has taken on this master myth of literacy instruction with as much force as Miller. As upsetting as this book has been to some (no really, it comes up often even 6 years later from people who now see it as their mission to prove him wrong), for me it points to a much more difficult reality that I think the field has to face. If I am allowed one big, pithy conclusion in my dissertation, it is this: to have good writing, we need a world in which good writing can matter. This is not something we can assume exists–as we so often do–; this is something we have to work to create. - The reactionary mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. Corey Robin (2011).
Read this book. Corey Robin has seemingly come out of nowhere and is now everywhere. I had heard of (and yes, ashamedly sort of half-skimmed his earlier book Fear: The History of a Political Idea) him before, but it was when Mike Konczal tweeted something about him hosting a group reading of Hayek on his blog that I checked out his new book. I’m glad I did. What Robin offers is a sorely needed re-grounding of the debate over left-right, looking to history to actually try to distinguish the two in a way that goes beyond partisan “Democrat” and “Republican.” In this, Robin works in the best tradition of others on the left, who have sought to get to the heart of the matter of what we are really talking about when we talk about “left” and “right.” Robin, in my mind, is picking up where writers like C. Wright Mills have left off. Robin’s work has been important to me simply because I had been struggling to identify what I see as an inextricably linked project or mission in writing instruction to something “leftist.” Robin has given me a better base from which I can think this through, as well as something to turn to whenever those silly arguments pop up whether someone can be a good writing instructor and be a republican or a right-wing ideologue. These arguments are silly because 1, you can’t, and 2, they completely mis-identify the question as being “democrat” versus “republican,” instead of “left” versus “right” in a much broader expanse. Are there “good writers” on the “right?” Obviously. But the mission of writing instruction in America has never solely been about “good writing,” but rather has always been about increasing the amount of voices that can participate in something called “democracy.” Next time someone tries to start this argument, I’ll just hand them a copy of this book and wait for them to read it. - Compulsory Mis-Education, and the Community of Scholars. Paul Goodman (1966).I was introduced to Andrew Hartman through his excellent piece (in the equally excellent Jacobin Magazine) on Teach For America. But it was a blog piece by him that tipped me off to this 1966 classic by Paul Goodman. I get why this book is so interesting to Hartman. This book reads as though it could have very easily been written in the past 5 years. The fact that these problems were pretty much the same 45 years ago is a testament to how pitiful our conceptions of national education really are. For me, what this really points to is that our normal conceptions of pedagogy, curriculum, and reform are simply useless. In my own work in the shift from high school to college writing instruction, one common complaint that always pops up is how unprepared high school students are to handle the “rigors” of college writing. The “solution” comes in a few well worn paths: explain better what “college” is all about to high school teachers, criticize methods of high school instruction, or argue for tougher standards for high school instruction. None of these approaches work. Why? They assume that curricular changes can be “pure” and unmediated. They cannot, for the very same reasons that Goodman devastatingly describes how “progressive education” was so watered down and implemented piecemeal that what it actually looked like was nothing at all like “progressive education.” Same as it ever was. Even IF high school teachers knew exactly what college writing was about, this does not mean that they would be able to just “do that.” Pressures for standardized grading, pressures from administrators with different ideas about instruction, from parents, from schools, from labor situations and environments (seriously, you try reading 125 student essays deeply and sincerely while offering well thought out feedback over the course of one week while also trying to deal with everything else teachers deal with…it won’t happen) dramatically alter and co-construct such curricula on a localized level in such a way that what we desire is never what we actually get.
So with that, here’s to an equally interesting 2012.
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