Reader Response
Encounters with Jane Tompkins
SUSAN
C.
JARRAIT
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 twocareer academic couple carrying the heavier domestic and teaChing load-in
short, as a wife-made me more sympathetic. I also had second thoughts
about the ways Tompkins' disciplinary history in literary studies and in elite
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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-fiveyear existence of NCTE. This was a lack Tompkins might have remedied in
the years following her entry into the domain of composition, but, unfortunately, the anthropological stance persists in theJAC interview.
Tompkins' claim to a fifteen-year history as a writing instructor does not
lead herto 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 composition 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 offeelings 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-their literacies-are different from those of Freire's students.
The next stage in critical pedagogy will attend to a double agenda: encouragingstudents to take responsibility, as Tompkins suggests, for their education,
along with recognizing the need for knowledge eXChange-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
Reader Response 353
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, andexpressivist 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" -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 comments in this vein, references to writing as grooming, like "getting a massage
orworkingout," 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
ofthose debates in composition theory, she seems to be 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-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
354 lAC
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 maledominated field, while at the same time encasing a cri tiq ue ofthe essay wi thin
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 lAC 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 interview was the feminist. Throughout the interview Tompkins resists identifying her practice with feminism, which she seems to eq ua te 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
Reader Response 355
implies that softening it, moving away from it as she is now, requires moving
away from feminism.
The most telling moment ofthis limited definition offeminism comes in
her response to the question about a need for a specifically "female-oriented
radical pedagogy." Tompkins speculates that a "specifically feminist pedagogy" 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 benevolent, philanthropic enterprise aimed at a group of ''women'' in reduced
circumstances. This is a reform, nota trans formative 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 movement 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, inyour-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-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-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 aggrandize-
356 JAC
ment 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-those wild and totally guileless marbles offear. 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 ofEverything. 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-callouses that protect, skin that gets red and
painful.
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio
Works Cited
Bizzell, Patricia. "The Praise of Folly, The Woman Rhetor, and Post-Modern Skepticism."
Rhetoric Society Quarterly 22.1 (Winter 1992): 7-17.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion ofIdentity. New York: Routledge,
1990.
Schilb, John. "The Role of Ethos: Ethics, Rhetoric, and Politics in Contemporary Feminist
Theory." PRE/TTEXT11 (1990): 211-34.