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In A Teaching Subject: Composition since 1966, Joseph Harris identifies five key words that reflect dominant pedagogical approaches to composition since the mid-196Os: growth, voice, process, error, and community. Following Harris, in Moving beyond Academic Discourse: Composition Studies and the Public Sphere, Christian Weisser proposes that with the social turn in composition, we might add public as the latest key word (43). Yet if we correctly understand Harris's recent opinion essay ("Revision as a Critical Practice," July 2003), it seems that he has a wholly different approach in mind, an approach that he sets in opposition to civic or publicly minded critical pedagogies, one that threatens to institute critical reading of texts-namely literary fiction-as the dominant approach to composition.
We fear that the types of English professors who see themselves primarily as literary critics and intellectuals (O'Dair, july 2003) and who seem to resent being assigned to teach composition in the first place will find Harris's piece an encouragement to teach composition as courses in the close reading of literary texts. Consider every example Harris gives: in the basic writing and the more advanced courses he describes, his students are writing what could essentially be termed essays of literary criticism. The purpose appears to be for students to show their mastery of the text, their ability to be good readers/good explicators. There seems no audience beyond teacher, self, or perhaps Bakhtin's super addressee, the audience who would receive their interpretations in just the right way. Despite his statement, "I am arguing for a focus not on form but on function, on use in context," none of the assignments Harris describes seems to have a context-that is, beyond the context of the student writing for the teacher. Even the reflective writing that he has students do is reflection on their ability to write literary criticism.
Even though Harris claims that his main goal is to help students make "stronger use of the work of others and of more clearly articulating one's own project as a writer" ($91), we have difficulty imagining how any of the assignments he describes helps students conceive oi themselves as anything more than writers of literary criticism. he defines students throughout his essay in terms of their ability to read and write...