Horner, Bruce

Horner, Bruce. Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique. New York UP: Albany, NY.
2000.
“In the academy, intellectual labor, in the form of “scholarship” is deemed to be one’s own work, treated as divorced from material social conditions, a product of the autonomous scholar” (2).
“One common criticism of this way of representing academic work, especially within Composition, highlights the relative emphasis given scholarship in comparison to teaching. Lists of publications and other presentations of research, for example, are often given more prominence in CVs than the lists of courses taught or services rendered” (4).
“Composition, of course, occupies a marginal position in relation to English studies, the “humanities, “ and the academy generally. As a consequence, its experience of and responses to the torsion between capitalization and proletariaanization differ from that of faculty more comfortably ensconced within these other realms” (14).
“often framed in terms of “what works” or “worked,” we isolate specific pedagogical techniques from the immediate material circumstances of their use, locating our work (and that of our students) not in the social, historical material process but in the commodifications of that work” (19).
“I have argued above that Composition has enjoyed less intellectual and work autonomy than others in the humanities and the academy generally because of its perceived greater organic significance to socioeconomic production, a significance it shares with primary and secondary school education” (23).
“The alternative challenge Composition faces is how teachers and students can confront the ways in which each material act of writing and reading mediates, in the sense of actively re-forming and transforming, and is mediated by social identification, difference and power, both responding to and reconstructing or revising these” (37). Identification
“That is to say, we need to place all our work in the material social-historical process, resisting dominant definitions of our work, our students, and ourselves” (72).
“Like their students composition faculty seem to have no more than a slippery place in the academy and return the ambivalence with which the academy treats them with ambivalence of their own” (105).
Not necessarily true.