response to Bishop

Wendy Bishop sums up the thesis of her address to the CCCC in one sentence: “Acknowledging institutional fatigue, I outline possibilities for individual renewal.” In the great debate on whether composition should emphasize the individual as a sort of autonomous whole or the social and political forces which shape individuals, Bishop approaches her topic from the first perspective. Compositionists, she says, are a “dedicated minority by choice: as agents instead of as those acted upon” (324). In positing free will, Bishop both defines the essential nature of self and uses it as the fulcrum for her argument.
Opposed to the individual is the institution of English education, a place where “activities and theories were being discarded or overwritten even as I felt I was just beginning to gain success with them,” a place where “scholarship appear(ed) to have a decade’s currency, if that long” (327). Staying current with changing theory and the various perspectives they offer of identity causes “burnout” (327). But again, she emphasizes the nature of man as opposed to the mechanistic universe as a way out of the problem. After comparing her colleagues to rocket ships crashing in the desert, she says: “I know these individuals continue because they have chosen to” (329).
Bishop restates the fundamental dilemma by quoting Joe Harris. Harris thinks that a different theory of intellectual life needs to be created: “one that admits to the ways in which we are positioned by gender, race, and class, but that also holds out the hope of a more fluid and open culture in which we can choose (emphasis his) the positions we want to speak from and for” (330).
In Bishop’s article, choice and free will trump the determinism of theory and leads to an education environment that is “not theory or practice, this or that, it’s person to person” (332).