look at me

i am an innocent textbook and my name is (insert name).
accept me as your personal savoir and your class will structure itself
your papers will grade themselves
and your students will critically frame themselves (not the structure and content of your course).

Le départ de cette réflexion était le plus souvent un sentiment d'impatience devant le `naturel' dont la presse, l'art, le sens commun affublent sans cesse une réalité qui, pour être celle dans laquelle nous vivons, n'en est pas moins parfaitement historique: en un mot, je souffrais de voir à tout moment confondues dans le récit de notre actualité, Nature et Histoire, et je voulais ressaisir dans l'exposition décorative de ce-qui-va-de-soi, l'abus idéologique qui, à mon sens, s'y trouve caché. (Barthes: 1970 p.9)

In “Joining the conversation” (Rhetoric review, 1994, p. 175), an anonymous scholar named TS criticizes the “inaccessible language” of scholarly writing in Rhet/Comp. Granted, all readers in a specialized field should expect to encounter “technical terms” and “specialized language”. However, the author holds scholars in rhetoric and composition to an especially high standard of writing: “I expect (naively) that people who teach composition will write well” (p. 183). The article concludes that the choice to produce crappy writing is "politically motivated".

Taking as a starting point Barthes' claim that "when cultural discourses hide their motivation, they transform “history into nature” (1972, p. 129), my textbook review emhasizes a reciprocal problem: the "nonacademic" pattern of evidence and self-justification in writing textbooks is also politically motivated, in that, by concealing theory (frequently through first-person narrative) writing texbooks naturalize certain theories about reading, writing and community action.

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