Classroom Booksploitation

...to approximately 1,500 students every semester, and "nearly all of them [are] staffed by graduate students," notes Brodkey in her new book, Writing in Designated Areas Only...

...In these texts, women write about gender, gays write about sexuality, and blacks write about race...

...me, a white guy from Manhattan who had gone to private schools and fancy summer camps, and who had earned a master's degree in creative writing...

...Composition readers come in every shape and size...

...We've included," the Introduction explains, "works by ecofeminists, African-American militants, Socialists, disabled activists, gay rights activists, and more...

...They don't seek to challenge composition departments, but rather offer English departments a way to deal with their own discontents...

...In 1995 the University of Minnesota writing program counted 37 anthologies that would meet both the school's composition and diversity requirements, and that list is not comprehensive...

...had the first and last word on the feelings and views of the disenfranchised...

...Most of them were contracted to work for one semester at a time, and very few stayed at LIU for more than two years...

...by women, by homosexuals, by people of color...

...These have titles like Connections: A Multicultural Reader for Writers (Mayfield, 1993), Making Cultural Connections: Readingfor Critical Analysis (Bedford-St...

...Today Brodkey is concerned that what is called multiculturalism is too often expressed as "an administrative concept," and that anthologies calling themselves multicultural can effectively ghettoize certain texts...

...They told the adjunct faculty what they were teaching and why they were teaching it...

...It seemed radical and anti-institutional, a force that might empower those who in the past had been excluded from academic life...

...For Rereading America and other texts like it, the "mainstream" is more or less defined by the Norton Anthology of Literature...

...There are collections of belleslettres, issue-oriented anthologies, even readers that offer, in place of professional writing, samples of student writing along with advice on how to build an essay...

...Given the odds," she writes, "my concern that most graduate students are not particularly good teachers of writing convinced me that sooner or later I would be asked to explain in court why I had not better prepared them to teach a course required of all entering students...

...The newer collection simply reasserts the boundaries of the traditional literary canon, but in negative terms...

...As recently as the mid-1980s there were no books like Rereading America, no freshman composition anthologies whose explicit subject was identity politics: race, class and gender...

...In an effort to demonstrate the anthology's inclusiveness, Multitude's editor manages to marginalize two world-famous literary figures...

...What the new multicultural readers do is simply to commercialize Brodkey's formula...

...According to its Preface, Rereading America focuses on "the myths that dominate U.S...

...Having a transient corps of part-time composition teachers is not something peculiar to LIU...

...The books protect the needs of institutions at the expense of the writing they anthologize and the students they hope to teach...

...Some lacked high school diplomas or GEDs...

...Not too long ago it seemed that composition was a battlefield with Leftist intellectuals championing multiculturalism and Right-wing academics defending institutional values...

...But if you look on the shelves of university bookstores you will see a number of texts that actually advertise themselves as multicultural readers...

...It sounds to me like someone is trying to administer the canon...

...The format can lead to an awful tokenism...

...Seated casually on a big aluminum desk, I read aloud from a textbook the university had recommended...

...Among the chapter headings are "The Myth of Individual Opportunity," "Myths of Gender" and "'The Myth of the Melting Pot...

...Rereading America guaranteed that, at the very least, all the $2,000-a-course instructors in all the various comp classes would be talking about the same general subject...

...The challenge Brodkey herself faced in putting together her "Writing About Difference" course was not "administering the canon," but managing the large numbers of graduate students who teach writing...

...In Making Cultural Connections, Neil Miller writes on lesbian motherhood...

...When I was teaching at LIU, the English Department hired over 60 part-timers, adjuncts and graduate students to teach writing courses...

...As the recommended text in a required English course, it appeared to tell the students that the university was on their side too...

...It is left to the white men to speak on larger philosophical issues...

...Flip through the tables of contents of the anthologies and you get the impression that they are composed of interchangeable parts...

...We worked from Rereading America: Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking and Writing (Bedford-St...

...Using Rereading America, the professor...

...Researchers estimate that 2.5 million students take freshman comp each year, and that 80 per cent of those students use some sort of anthology...

...A large number of hires were made at the last minute...

...These books help large institutions manage their composition courses and their composition instructors...

...The intent of the course was not, she explains, so much to impose her politics on her students as her pedagogy on her underprepared TAs...

...The multicultural readers gave the writing classes both a pedagogy and a justification...

...Directors of these programs are in vulnerable positions: Many are untenured faculty, and they are held legally and professionally responsible for courses taught by amateurs...

...The new multicultural readers represent not so much a challenge to the established academic order as a means of managing that challenge...

...Now these books are produced at such a rate that it's difficult to keep pace with them...

...Bill Cosby's image, I explained, "is divided in a way that both facilitates the corporate project and conceals its true nature...

...Multicultural readers are a corporate response to an academic crisis...

...All of these books try to present diverse points of view...

...The anthologies have slots to be filled, and writers are selected to fill those various slots...

...Martin's, 1992...

...One man sitting near the window had recently gotten out of prison...

...But in actual practice it did something quite different...

...In Rereading America, Richard Goldstein writes on lesbian motherhood and gay fatherhood...

...Bedford-St...

...There are rhetorics organized around technical issues of writing, like exposition, description, analysis, and argument...

...Martin's, 1994), and Multitude: Cross-Cultural Readings for Writers (McGraw-Hill, 1993...

...Martin's alone published 11 new composition anthologies last January, five of which focused on multicultural themes...

...Gabriel Brownstein, a new contributor to the NL?·, teaches English at Barnard College and Parsons School of Design...

...In 1990 Linda Brodkey designed "Writing About Difference," a composition course at the University of Texas at Austin...

...It's a compendium of voices from the margins of society...

...Connections includes Rachel L. Jones' essay, "What's Wrong with Black English...

...Multiculturalism tends to assume that some people are different and others aren't," says Brodkey...

...My freshman composition students stared at me, unimpressed...

...culture...

...It's a little like mini-vans," says Patricia Rossi, Director of Composition Readers at HarperCollins...

...Most of them lived in Brooklyn, most were black or Latino, most held moderate-wage jobs and came to school afterward...

...to aplace at once within the academy and outside of standard course work...

...Everybody wants a chunk of the market...

...Rereading America, say its editors, "deliberately includes few traditional or conservative points of view, because such views seldom challenge the cultural myths that have surrounded us all our lives...

...In Multitude, for instance, John Updike is identified as "an important contemporary novelist," while Chinua Achebe is "a Nigerian writer and educator," and Isaac Bashevis Singer is "a leading Yiddish [sic] author...

...The war seems to have been won not by the revolutionaries orthe reactionaries, but by commercial interests and a creeping bureaucratic conservatism...

...The textbook can perform an important administrative function: It at once asserts and expands the boundaries of an English department's authority, lending universities the appearance of broad-mindedness and simultaneously giving a school somewhere to stick the authors it wants to keep out of its survey course in literature...

...A woman in the back row was a recovered crack addict...

...All over the country, university writing program directors are attempting to design curricula for instructors they do not quite know or trust...

...The English Department at Texas offers more than 50 sections of English 30 ??”basic composition...

...There is big money in the selling of such textbooks...

...The presumption is that the traditional literary canon is the standard against which all other applicants must be assessed...

...It excludes "classic" and "good" writing in favor of works by blacks, women, homosexuals, Socialists, and environmentalists...

...It was one of the first and most celebrated attempts to introduce a multicultural composition curriculum, yet its focus on issues of diversity and race drew fire from (among others) the columnist George Will and the conservative National Association of Scholars...

...while Multitude reprints the same piece without the question mark in its title...

...If, for instance, you needed a feminist scholar discussing love affairs, you would choose either Deborah Tannen or Carol Gilligan...

...Writers are presented as spokespeople...