Encounters with Jane Tompkins 

 

Jane Tompkins's Message to Academe: Nurture the Individual, Not Just the Intellect

Her new, personal approach to the classroom is alternately described as 'goofy' and 'revolutionary'

By ALISON SCHNEIDER

 

It's easy to make fun of Jane Tompkins. For some literary critics, her new work seems lightweight, even laughable. While they hold forth on hermeneutics and historicity,

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Is the Duke University scholar Jane Tompkins correct when she argues that higher education has focused too much on the intellect and not enough on nurturing students as people? Should more professors adopt her techniques, which include letting students talk about their feelings?

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The Duke University professor of English spends her days discussing heart and holism.

For the past year, she has been on a crusade, getting personal about the professional. She kicks off workshops with meditation, gives lectures with titles like "The Inner Life of Teachers and Students," and talks openly about topics that make other scholars sneer. Emotions, for example. Jane Tompkins's emotions, not Jane Eyre's.

 

In her quest to let scholars know that she feels their pain, she's spoken at big institutions and small, at mainstream conferences and offbeat gatherings. Loneliness, fear, competition, hyper-intellectualism: Jane Tompkins has been there, done that, and decided it's not worth the price.

 

Two years ago, she published a memoir that chronicled her conversion from traditional scholar to experimental educator. A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned (Addison-Wesley) was more than a critique of academe; it was a call to arms.

 

Ms. Tompkins has little patience for the corporatism and careerism sweeping higher education. She wants colleges to be communal, not combative; to focus on the self as well as the subject matter; to nurture the imagination, not just the intellect. Academe, she insists, needs to do more than make a student marketable. It needs to educate "the whole human being" -- mind, body, and spirit.

 

That kind of talk makes many scholars squeamish. "Goofy," some call her. "Ridiculous," say a few. Jane Tompkins -- a respected scholar with a notable reputation -- has gone soft, her critics carp. She's just another New Age, crystal-carrying, touchy-feely crank.

That's one take. Another goes like this: Jane Tompkins is a "revolutionary," a "pathbreaker," a "standard-bearer for self-honesty." She is "the teaching conscience" of academe.

 

Lately, the latter view has gained steam. In January, Ms. Tompkins was in Washington, giving a talk at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, which had just honored A Life in School.

 

Professors and administrators squeezed into a conference room, spilling into the hallway to hear her speak. Her topic: "Toward Wholeness as Teachers, Students, and Institutions." The magic kicked in when Ms. Tompkins grabbed the microphone, strolled into the crowd, and worked the room.

 

Audience members couldn't take the floor fast enough. They talked about how hard it was to transform universities into holistic learning environments. Words like "grieving," "struggle," and "inspirational" were bandied about.

 

"The atmosphere -- almost of testimony -- was extraordinarily powerful," says Ms. Tompkins's husband, Stanley Fish, a professor of English and law at Duke, and no stranger to the spotlight himself. Just last week, he announced that he would become the dean of arts and sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago in January 1999. His wife will join him there the following fall as an education professor, and will teach one course a year. (See related coverage in "Peer Review".)

 

Since her memoir came out, Ms. Tompkins has been inundated with fan mail. "So many times I have read one of your sentences and it has resonated so deeply within me that I could feel it in my stomach," a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley wrote.

 

That's not surprising, considering Ms. Tompkins's familiarity with life inside the belly of the academic beast. She knows the game; she played it for years, rushing from classroom to conference, pushing herself to publish, scrambling to break into the big time. Along the way, she built a reputation as an intellectual iconoclast: first as an advocate for reader-response theory, then as a canon-buster -- arguing that neglected women writers and the authors of popular Westerns should be read with as much care as Milton and Melville -- and finally as a champion of personal writing and confessional criticism. In the long run, she got what she wanted -- a Ph.D. from Yale University, a tenured post at Temple University, a full professorship at Duke.

 

She also wound up with stomach aches, heart palpitations, migraines, and two divorces. Her success wasn't making her happy, and the sickness, she decided, was inside academe, not herself.

 

Education, from grade school on, she concluded, had "stunted and misshaped me for life," warping her into a "terrified performer" more intent on impressing students with how smart she was than on teaching them how to think for themselves. Imagination, intuition, the inner life were suspect; the intellect reigned supreme. And campus community -- among professors or with students -- was a myth.

 

So she changed her tactics. She took up Buddhist meditation, studied karate, volunteered in a homeless shelter, and slowly, tentatively, embraced a new style of teaching.

 

Ms. Tompkins put her lecture notes aside, surrendered control over the classroom, and let the students do the talking. They planned the syllabus, led discussions, and figured out their grades.

 

The Duke students also immersed themselves, physically as well as mentally, in the experience of the texts. They climbed a mountain while studying Thoreau; stayed overnight on an island off North Carolina to feel the magic of Melville's sea; worked on a plantation while reading Toni Morrison's Beloved, then sat in a candle-lit classroom reciting quotes from the novel aloud. Along the way, they tried to figure out what the books meant to them on a personal level and what they, as classmates, meant to one another.

 

It was the sort of experience that occurs all too infrequently in college, Ms. Tompkins says. "Higher education, in order to produce the knowledge and skills students need to enter certain lucrative professions, cuts students off from both their inner selves and the world around them," she wrote in her book. "It prepares them to enter professional school but not to develop as whole human beings."

 

Ms. Tompkins wants that to change. "Human growth can't take place without self-examination," she says in an interview. "The opportunity for people to look at themselves and to understand who they are and where they are in their lives is absolutely essential. Without it, education is, if not worthless, only partial."

 

Ms. Tompkins is not the only one putting a spiritual spin on pedagogy. When it comes to holistic education, what's going on is bigger than any single professor. There's a movement afoot -- one that started in the 1960s and is getting its second wind in the '90s. Jane Tompkins is only one part of it, academics say. Scholars are fed up with the competition, the hierarchy, the professional vanity, the anomie eating away at academe: "There is a huge, pent-up frustration in the discipline," says Martha Woodmansee, an English professor at Case Western Reserve University. "That's why people are coming out."

 

But "coming out" has its costs. "It's very hard to go out there and say words like 'spirituality,' 'heart,' 'inner life,' 'self-nurture' in academe. That's a discourse that's been really trashed," Ms. Tompkins explains. "At the same time, what I'm discovering is that there is a marked groundswell of hunger for exactly this way of talking about work and life."

 

D.G. Myers, an associate professor of religion and English at Texas A&M University, has an appetite for it: "Her and my generation have been too clever," and sophistication has prevailed over moral seriousness, he says.

 

Too many people in academe, he adds, never ask themselves, "'Do I believe what I'm saying?' Instead, they ask, 'Will this get me into print?' Tompkins asks herself, 'Do I believe what I'm saying?' I think she's doing God's work. I think she's doing something holy."

 

Ms. Tompkins is certainly on a mission. This year, she took her act, or, rather, her activism, on the road. At many stops, she was preaching to the choir. That suits her just fine. "My mission is not to convert the unconverted to my ideas, but to encourage people who are already headed in this direction," she says.

 

Her clout as a conventional scholar gives her a credibility that educators peripheral to the traditional academic enterprise may lack. But her reputation doesn't guarantee that the welcome mat is always rolled out. Plenty of her peers think that Ms. Tompkins is deluded, if not downright dangerous.

 

When she kicked off a workshop last August at Kentucky Wesleyan University with meditation, a man in the back of the room pretended to snore. Evaluations from professors who heard her speak at Appalachian State University last September were peppered with ad hominem attacks, like this one: "Jane Tompkins would be offensive if she weren't so out of touch."

 

A few months ago, she received what she calls "a devastating caricature" from Johnny Wink, a professor of English at Ouachita Baptist University. After attending one of her workshops, he wrote "The Ballad of the Duke Blue Devil." Two of its more notable lines: "She thought she played the savant./I thought she played the fool."

 

Turning over all authority to students and tossing away one's notes strike Mr. Wink as lazy, if not ludicrous. "I liked many things about the '60s," he says in an interview, "but one thing I didn't like -- the professor who gets off the dais and puts love beads on and sits at the feet of the students and says, 'Teach me! I don't have anything to teach you. Teach me!' Those people didn't stop picking up their paychecks each month."

 

Preparing a student for life, he says, "means teaching Beowulf, not throwing Beowulf away and drinking a glass of mead and winging it. That's where this can become a vacuous thing."

Gerald Graff, a professor of English and education at the University of Chicago, agrees. Like Ms. Tompkins, he worries about the breakdown of community on college campuses and wants professors to connect more deeply to their students. But he doesn't think that professors need to shut up in the classroom for students to feel safe to speak.

 

"I worry about some of the things that pass for holistic education that sound anti-intellectual," he says. "Jane sometimes writes as if intellectual inquiry is itself part of the problem instead of part of the solution. She seems to think that it's less important that students are intellectually challenged than that they feel good about themselves."

Even if student-centered classrooms do work at Duke, it's a stretch to assume that they'll work at less prestigious institutions, some professors say. Duke undergraduates arrive ready to do some independent thinking, but students at less competitive institutions may well need more hand-holding from the person at the front of the classroom, the argument goes.

 

What's more, the critics say, Ms. Tompkins can get away with a guinea-pig approach to education because of who she is: a tenured, untouchable, full professor.

 

"Can you do this and get tenure?" asks Pamela R. Matthews, an associate professor of English at Texas A&M University and a fan of Ms. Tompkins. "I don't know, but who's going to risk it? You have to prove that you can do the traditional stuff before you can risk the accusation that what you're doing is not intellectual enough."

 

Ms. Tompkins also gets grief from colleagues in the hard sciences who say they have too many facts to cover to spend time discussing how students feel.

The resistance doesn't surprise Ms. Tompkins. "My enthusiasm for the way I teach now makes some people feel really bad," she says. "It seems to be saying that lecturing is no good or is passe. But that's not what I'm saying. There is no one way to teach, no single format or formula."

 

That said, she finds many professors' objections rooted more in fiction than in fact. Covering lots of content doesn't necessarily produce real learning, she says, and the risks of experimentation aren't nearly as dangerous as some professors make them out to be. The real sticking point when it comes to her work, she knows, is the scholarly world's aversion to notions that smack of spirituality.

 

"I'm a Marxist and a materialist," says H. Aram Veeser, an associate professor of English at City College of the City University of New York. "I'm uncomfortable with the language of spirituality. I don't know what it means."

Those who think they do know often don't like its implications. "It's not the purpose of teaching to form an emotional bond with students," says Wendy Kaminer, a public-policy fellow at Radcliffe College who calls Ms. Tompkins's approach "ridiculous."

 

"The purpose is to teach students to think, not to teach them how to feel," Ms. Kaminer says. "When you talk about spirituality, you risk invading students' privacy. The 'whole human being' is none of her goddamn business."

 

Ms. Tompkins disagrees. In April, she visited the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and did her usual shtick: workshops, readings, roundtables, receptions.

At a faculty workshop sponsored by the university, she asked professors to answer a series of questions about what they needed to support their "growth as professionals," and what sorts of fears were preventing them from fulfilling their goals.

 

Many professors were enthusiastic about the exercise. "I heard a lot of little epiphanies taking place," said Patricia A. Turisi, director of the university's Center for Teaching Excellence.

 

"I got a lot out of it," says A. Midori Albert, an anthropologist at Wilmington. But it took a lot out of her, too. "To get a lot out of her approach, you have to be willing to closely examine yourself and that takes a lot of guts. A lot of people don't want to do that."

Ms. Tompkins didn't always have a ready answer for participants, either. To each crushing admission of fear she heard -- including "If I'm not fulfilling all of my professional expectations, my whole existence will have no meaning and my life will be for naught" -- she responded, in a gently encouraging tone, "That's great."

 

She knows that one of the risks of these kinds of workshops is that professors will expect her to provide all of the answers. But she is neither a psychologist nor a seer, she says. Her job, as she sees it, is to ask the questions and to help people find the answers for themselves.

 

The approach was well received at a graduate-student workshop at Wilmington. At 9 a.m., Ms. Tompkins and her colleague Martha Abshire Simmons, a visiting English professor at Duke, walked into a conference room carrying purple-fringed carnations and chrysanthemums. They have been teaching a course at Duke called "Writing Spiritual Autobiography," and they are eager to share their ideas.

 

They popped a cassette of piano jazz into a boom box and pointed out the bagels and orange juice laid out in a corner. Food and flowers were present wherever Ms. Tompkins went at Wilmington. This was about spirit, mind, and body, after all.

 

After some meditation, the group set to work. The graduate students did writing exercises. Then, as American Indian flute music played in the background, they drew pictures representing their deepest desires.

 

Lots of epiphanies occurred this time, although a few of them took Ms. Tompkins by surprise. Frances Bessellieu, a graduate student in education, said the exercise convinced her that the most effective way to teach is "direct instruction" -- in which the teacher decides what the students should learn.

 

That approach makes Ms. Tompkins gag, but she took the news graciously. She knows that when people embark on the road less traveled, they don't always wind up at the same destination.

 

From the look of things, Ms. Tompkins's road is taking her straight out of the classroom. She is spending less and less time teaching and says she may retire from university life altogether in the not-too-distant future. She thinks she can contribute more as a teacher of teachers than as a teacher of students.

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Susan C. Jarratt

 

I confess that I have mixed feelings about Jane Tompkins. I'm glad she discovered pedagogy, writing, and the West. But, curiously, I find myself already in those places she discovered, a native in habitats stumbled upon by an anthropologist. How does the native feel when the anthropologist decides to study his or her culture? Flattered, exposed, welcoming, objectified. My response to the interview traces its themes back to my encounters with Tompkins on three different occasions.

 

Encounter One: Teaching the Teachers

 

When Jane Tompkins delivered her "Pedagogy of the Distressed" talk at Miami University, I was indeed distressed; in fact, I was really angry. Here was Tompkins, a person with a major reputation in literary criticism and theory who had seemingly just discovered the concept of pedagogy, coming to lecture a group of people many of whom had spent their professional lives working on pedagogy. She announced that she had read Paulo Freire a few months before and was very excited about her discovery. Freire had already been studied in our field for years. The publication of her essay as a lead article in College English only made me angrier. When a graduate student comes across a new find and makes a major change in his or her thinking, writing, or teaching, it doesn't often make for a major publication. But when a first-rank, mainstream literary scholar discovers teaching, this is big news.

 

But I'm no longer angry about Tompkins' lecture or her essay. As letters reacting to her essay were published in CE and as she responded, I began to rethink her status in the profession of literary studies and her experience as a woman in the academy. The account of her life as the member of a two- career academic couple carrying the heavier domestic and teaching load&emdash;in short, as a wife&emdash;made me more sympathetic. I also had second thoughts about the ways Tompkins' disciplinary history in literary studies and in elite universities kept her at a distance from composition as a discipline. These changes, however, didn't affect my puzzlement about her lack of study in our field before she made her pronouncements. One of the letters of response to her article, after praising her, gently informed Tompkins of the twenty-five-year existence of NCTE. This was a lack Tompkins might have remedied in the years following her entry into the domain of composition, but, unfortu-nately, the anthropological stance persists in the JAC interview.

Tompkins' claim to a fifteen-year history as a writing instructor does not lead her to identify herself with "people who do that day to day"; she's still an outsider by choice. Though Tompkins feels "indebted" to people working in the field and acknowledges good work about writing pedagogy, she doesn't yet have many thoughts about the discipline, claiming that her pedagogy involves "no methods at all." While having read Elbow on writing groups influences her own writing practice, Tompkins doesn't speak about applying Elbow's ideas in her own classroom. Not being trained in the discipline is a handicap impressively overcome by many first-generation rhetoric and com-position scholars, including Lisa Ede and Elizabeth Flynn. Compositionists would have expected Tompkins, more than the other major scholars in philosophy, linguistics, and literary theory featured in these interviews, to have done some homework in the field, especially given the fact that she's writing a book about pedagogy. Though I'm no longer angry, I'm disappointed at her continuing distance from composition studies. In this interview, her response to the field remains primarily at the level of feelings rather than intellectual or scholarly engagement.

If she were reading in the field, Tompkins would find her current ideas about Freirean-style pedagogy moving in the same direction as others who attempted at one time a direct imitation of Freire's democratization methods but now see the need for adaptation. We are now listening to what Freire has said about differences in contexts, observing that the needs and positions of U.S. students&emdash;their literacies&emdash;are different from those of Freire's students. The next stage in critical pedagogy will attend to a double agenda: encouraging students to take responsibility, as Tompkins suggests, for their education, along with recognizing the need for knowledge exchange&emdash;knowledge about how language works dialogically, and about material and social conditions for the production of discourse in various cultural contexts. Critical pedagogues like Henry Giroux, Ira Shor, and Kathleen Weiler have moved in this direction, but there is a great need for feminists and others associated with social movements in the U.S. to articulate responses to this challenge. I found myself speculating about how the new book on pedagogy might weigh in on this issue. We might take a clue from Tompkins' idea about performance.

 

Tompkins describes traditional teaching as performance, with the teacher exercising authority and delivering information. In moving away from that mode, Tompkins implies she is no longer a performer, only herself. This understanding of performance differs from some current feminist readings of subjectivity in general, and gender in particular, as performances (for example, see Bizzell and Butler). The idea is that everyone is performing a self, a gender, all the time, and that institutional positions such as teacher and student are always performances as well, with a range of possible choices about how to carry out those performances. On this analysis, Tompkins chooses not her real self over a performing self, but rather changes the kind of performance to one that allows for more emotion in the classroom.

 

Opening the classroom to emotion and personal experience is a tactic endorsed by teachers from a number of positions: certain feminisms, cultural studies, critical pedagogy, and expressivist composition. But this tactic serves different ends in these different contexts. In service of what political project can we see Tompkins' "liberatory" teaching, then? When she speaks of getting students to take responsibility, Tompkins sounds somewhat like advocates of critical pedagogy. But her characterizations of students and of the act of writing suggest different alignments. Tompkins focuses on the experiences of "the individuals who happen to be in the room"&emdash;single collections of life-experience presumably undifferentiated by social factors such as class, race, gender. Further, Tompkins' way of talking about writing as self-discovery casts her as the subject of expressivist pedagogy: a writer on an internal journey. In the comparison of writing with therapy, she sounds much like Elbow, advocating writing as "self-development, self-discovery." Though I don't share this view of composition theory, I respect those who advance strong and serious arguments for it. But Tompkins' further com-ments in this vein, references to writing as grooming, like "getting a massage or working out," seem to trivialize the focus on the individual, making writing sound like a yuppie pastime.

 

Much ink has been shed in the arguments about expressive versus social constructionist theories of writing. As with many important debates, much rides on the definitions of its terms. Not only does Tompkins seem unaware of those debates in composition theory, she seems lobe several stages behind that dialogue in her treatment of the writing subject so unproblematically as a given, "natural" self. I feel quite certain that Tompkins is very aware of current theories of subjectivity but is purposely avoiding them&emdash;to be accessible, to try to cut through an alienating theoretical language, to reposition herself and her writing in the academy. Tompkins' career trajectory leads her away from theory in general; she wants now to uncomplicate and merge personal and academic, home and school. While I respect a personal decision made at some professional risk in an exposed public arena, in my view, Tompkins' stance is not the most productive one for composition studies now. The most exciting advances in arguments about composition and literary studies are coming out of current work in feminist theory and cultural studies, places where "experience" and "self' are both valued and analyzed. Especially given the current work exposing the negative feminization of composition, turning for answers to key questions in composition theory toward an unmediated experience of the personal, strongly associated with the feminine, is a bad idea.

 

Encounter Two: Feminism, or How Political Is the Personal?

 

When I picked up the issue of New Literary History centered on feminist epistemology, it was with an uneasy feeling. Already knowing I had major intellectual objections to the key essay, I placed myself in the positions of the feminists who were asked to respond. How would I have handled such a task? How would I have negotiated my conflicting desires to argue, critique, even displace the feminist author's views with my own and to preserve solidarity among feminists, a marginal group in academic knowledge-production? Tompkins' response to the situation struck me as perfect. She acknowledged the difficulty, responded to the author as an academic woman in a male-dominated field, while at the same time encasing a critique of the essay within her response. Her creative approach to the task exemplifies critique in the strong sense: respectful, engaged, and committed.

 

I often include her essay, "Me and My Shadow," on reading lists for graduate seminars, and it surprised me the first time female graduate students reacted with anger and resentment to it. They said, "Tompkins has the leisure, the freedom to respond in such a relaxed way because of her status. If one of us tried to write such a piece, it would never be published." Tompkins addresses the complaint in the JAC interview effectively. Should she not move into a personal mode because it is possible for her to do so and not for others? No.

 

The more interesting question is how she deploys the personal, the autobiographical: what kind of personal self she creates or performs. As in her remarks about the function of writing, Tompkins keeps alive the idea of a self uncovered, discovered. In the questions about deconstructive writing and the reference to Cixous, there was an opportunity to refigure the relation of writing to "self," but instead "self' gets collapsed back into "self-creation" without any exploration of text or performance in deconstruction.

 

One self Tompkins was neither confessing nor professing in this inter-view was the feminist. Throughout the interview Tompkins resists identify-ing her practice with feminism, which she seems to equate with "female." The text is full of qualifications of the term: her teaching is "historically feminist, or by circumstances feminist"; the current relationship between the personal and the academic is for Tompkins "de facto feminist." In many moments, the evocation of feminism suggests to Tompkins the exclusion of men; to be "feminist" is to be "cordoned off." Again, this response can be placed in her own personal history. Her relation to the academy features competition and "personal injury," to which she responded by attacking the "male critical establishment." As Tompkins recreates that history and its present for herself, she implicitly associates feminism with that attack, but she then implies that softening it, moving away from it as she is now, requires moving away from feminism.

 

The most telling moment of this limited definition of feminism comes in her response to the question about a need for a specifically "female-oriented radical pedagogy." Tompkins speculates that a "specifically feminist peda-gogy" would be needed in specific circumstances. The example she gives is a literacy program for pregnant women in North Carolina. Only "other" women need feminism? The implication here is that feminism is a benevo-lent, philanthropic enterprise aimed at a group of "women" in reduced circumstances. This is a reform, not a transformative feminism: a matronizing (rather than patronizing) gesture which fails to acknowledge the larger structures of gender power, the possibility that patriarchy affects women and men in every class and in every classroom.

This interview creates an odd picture of feminism, the political move-ment and intellectual operation within which Tompkins' life and work make sense. At times it seemed that Tompkins defines feminism as many of my undergraduates do: an aggressive, woman-promoting, male-deriding, in-your-face movement that has nothing to do with them, that wishes only to exclude men. Certainly, there are feminists and feminisms that fit that description. But so many of the ideas and plans Tompkins presents in the interview and in her work&emdash;the critique of Westerns as misogynist, the need to reconnect the personal and academic, the need for understanding students and teachers as whole people with emotional and material existences as well as intellectual&emdash;all these projects have deeply feminist connections. That Tompkins is silent on those and offers in place only an interest in the responsibility or pain of the individual throws her comments by default into a liberal theory of democracy in which people are individuals with separate emotions and lives and with responsibilities within a social contract system. This stance is disappointing and not consistent with the Freirean source. Despite Tompkins' attempt to distance herself from the epistemology of her husband, she speaks more to an audience of potentially hostile men than to feminists or even other women.

 

At moments, Tompkins aligns the genders in a more productive way. Her remarks about a men's movement suggest a relational change and note potential problems with this particular men's movement. I also appreciated her response to the question of Freire and sexism. It's too easy to ignore Freire's intellectual history and context, to pick up on the exclusive language and dismiss the conceptual and liberatory power of his work.

 

Encounter Three: Beautiful Blue Eyes

 

Jane Tompkins came to Miami University again, this time to talk about Buffalo Bill. As a native Texan, I once again felt "discovered." She suggested that her visit to a museum in Wyoming constituted an unmediated encounter with "the West"; it was an attempt to cut through the layers of aggrandizement and reaction by confronting Bill face to face. Ergo the eyes, noted in the Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem she distributed with the lecture. I thought about buffalo eyes&emdash;those wild and totally guileless marbles of fear. Because you only see them in movies as the camera gets close when they're about to get killed. I also thought about all the pairs of cunning blue eyes I've seen under the brims of cowboy hats in kicker bars. Picture Harlin in Thelma and Louise. There's no innocently cutting through that Western, male ethos, descended directly from B.B. Cody. I think about the boy in my brother's high school class who had a beautiful eye (color unknown) kicked out by a cowboy boot in a totally typical little brawl one night. I didn't need to go to a museum to encounter "the West."

 

But then Tompkins knows all this. That's why my reactions are mixed. I was puzzled by the questions on West of Everything. What better to do with Westerns than put our best critical energies into exploring their violence and misogyny? I also wondered about the question on animal rights. Why not talk about Indians instead of animals, especially in 1992? The "Indians" chapter has been anthologized for writing classes and written about by at least one compositionist (Schilb). Tompkins anticipated the sharp focus on Native Americans this year, examining the way knowledge is created.

Through writing this response I discovered that Jane Tompkins likes to discover things and that I don't like to feel "discovered." Writing this response wasn't much like massage. It felt more like scraping a pumice stone over rough and calloused skin&emdash;callouses that protect, skin that gets red and painful.

 

Works Cited

 

Bizzell, Patricia. "The Praise of Folly, The Woman Rhetor, and Post-Modem Skepticism. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 22.1 (Winter 1992): 7-17.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Schilb, John. "The Role of Ethos: Ethics, Rhetoric, and Politics in Contemporary Feminist Theory.' PRE/71TEXT 11 (1990): 211-34.