Networked Process. Helen Foster

be expected to navigate in their futures. Petraglia maintains that evaluating students on their performance in the impoverished contexts of GWSI is not just “unrealistic” but is also “unethical” (90–91).

      Criticism of GWSI also considers contexts that would better facilitate students’ writing. “The combined evidence from many studies” Freedman reports, “pointed compellingly to the powerful facilitative effect of establishing a richly textured and finely managed discursive context” for students (141). This, she continues, “is what we saw typically in the disciplinary classes observed, where students did indeed learn to write, and learn to write extraordinarily well” (141). Her suggestion for an alternative to GWSI is “a specialized model of WAC” that might function in a variety of ways, for example, with writing centers, “sheltered courses,” and/or writing-intensive courses (140). Suggesting that writing cannot be taught but that we can nevertheless locate environments for students in which writing “naturally occurs,” Petraglia, too, suggests guidelines analogous to WAC (94). Lil Brannon, who reports on The University at Albany, SUNY’s move away from compulsory first-year composition to a WAC model, along with their rationalization for doing so, says that first-year composition continued to function so long as they conceived of literacy and writing in strictly functional terms, as “something basic, a skill to be mastered, a technology to be applied” (239). Having critiqued that assumption, an assumption that constructs students in terms of lack and deficiency, they were able to “move away from ghettoized general writing skills instruction” and toward a model of literacy that views students as developing writers (240). This move was accomplished, she says, by a group of faculty across the curriculum understanding that the first-year composition requirement was based on a “‘skills’ concept of writing that was losing professional currency” that contradicted what those responsible for SUNY’s composition program believed about writing and what “major researchers in the field found credible” (240). This vein of criticism of GWSI suggests programmatic changes that will provide students with more rhetorically sound environments. Such changes, of course, also have implications for disciplinarity.

      Many in this collection advocate for reform in first-year composition; others call for its abolition. Many are sympathetic to Freedman’s position that “in the end, I am arguing against stand-alone GWSI classes” (140). While they argue for reform rather than abolition, even Kaufer and Dunmire, write that “the question of a college writing program’s goals and cultural legitimation has to be answered better than we have so far answered it” (218). In terms of activity theory, the writing done in GWSI courses must meet the objectives of each of the activity systems served by the course; the activity system of the GWSI course, on the other hand, simply does not exist beyond the confines of the course. Petraglia says, too, that the real question is not whether the GWSI course “could be doing something better but whether it is attempting to do something that needs to be done at all” (89). “Baldly stated,” he writes, “general writing skills instruction—perhaps the very notion of the composition classroom—is an idea whose time has gone” (97).

      This strand of post-process also distances itself from early process theory, as it tacitly envelops process theory and practice into its critique of the ubiquitous GWSI approach. It also presumes to envelop the scholarship of the social and cultural turn of the mid-1980s on as part of its domain. These scholars appropriate this scholarship as theoretical ground upon which they offer additional theoretical formulations to render the composition course more consonant and amenable to the social/cultural turn. Still, some within this post-process strand believe the course to be hopelessly compromised by its disciplinary and institutional context, and they call for its abolition (“The New”).

      Interestingly, Robert Connors opens this edited collection with a historical account of calls for both the reform and abolition of composition, so that we can, he says, better understand how the current abolitionist movement compares with those of the past. Historically, he says, calls for abolition have come from those outside the field, whereas the current one is being proffered by insiders. Because insiders do have knowledge of the local circumstances of our disciplinary situation, Connors suggests the current abolitionist movement warrants greater scrutiny and consideration on our part.

      Strand Two Post-Process, Comprised of Those Who Explicitly Self-Identify as Post-Process but Appropriate from Kent’s Theory of Paralogic Hermeneutics Only Specific Concepts, Which They Mediate

      This strand of post-process theory includes those who explicitly self-identify as post-process but appropriate specific concepts from Kent’s theory, which they then mediate. While Kent’s position might be said to constitute a strong version of a particular concept, most in this group do not fully share Kent’s conviction. Kent acknowledges this in the introduction to his edited collection, Post-Process Theory: Beyond the Writing-Process Paradigm, published in 1999.

      In the introduction, Kent writes that “different incarnations” of post-process theory exists (1), and that while not all of the book’s contributors agree about “the nature of ‘post’ in ‘post-process’ theory, all agree that change is in the air,” regarding how we talk about writing and what writers do (5). It is with such a caveat, then, that we can reasonably expect this collection to reflect a broad range of consonance with Kent’s theory as formulated and described in Paralogic Rhetoric. Kent distills three principle assumptions that he believes unite the scholarship of the book’s contributors,: that writing is (1) public, (2) interpretive, and (3) situated.

      The claim that writing is public implies two assumptions: (1) that writing is constituted by communicative interaction between individuals who share specific relations with others and the world at specific historical moments, and (2) that since these moments and relations are unique in each instance of communicative interaction, “no process can capture what writers do” in these ever-changing moments and relations (1–2). While it is advantageous for individuals to have a command of conventions, genres, and language use, or what Kent calls “codifiable shortcuts,” these do not equate to a “Big Theory,” as they cannot function as a repeatable process that would lead to success in every writing situation. The point, Kent says, is that a writer “cannot start from nowhere” (2). There is always a public dimension to writing.

      The claim that writing is interpretive refers to an act that engages in “a relation of understanding” with others (2). Interpretation is thus equally involved in reception and production. Because it engages in perpetual hermeneutic acts, interpretation constitutes nothing less than our attempt to make sense of the world. Although hermeneutic acts are based on guesswork, Kent does concede that practice can render us “better guessers” (2–3) but insists that effective guessing resists codification to any process that might guarantee success. Because any degree of knowing is the result of interpretation, most post-process theorists maintain that interpretation “goes all the way down.” Writing cannot occur, therefore, in a “vacuum,” since the ground of interpretation is a relationship with others and the world (2–3).

      That writing is situated simply indicates that “writers are never nowhere,” a notion Kent concedes is as equally commonplace among process as post-process theorists. However, the latter put more emphasis on situatedness, he says, given their understanding of a communicative act as a fluid and indeterminate “hermeneutic dance” comprised of two simultaneous acts, prior theory and passing theory. From this perspective, situatedness assumes that we are always “somewhere” in relation to other language users, a positioning that influences not only the nature of our prior theory but also how we use a prior theory to formulate a passing theory. Importantly, these communicative instances “can never be reduced to a predictable process” (4).

Critiques of Process within Strand Two Post-Process

      Again, the degree to which Post-Process contributors share these three basic concepts of writing varies, but all are united in their critique of process. From a historical perspective, George Pullman critiques the history of the process movement as a rhetorical narrative of “triumph of compassion and empiricism” over the current-traditional rhetoric of “tradition and prejudice” (16). This was accomplished with two moves: one from a focus on the teacher to the student and the other from a notion of writing as skill to writing as ontological, or as a way of being (23–25). This “triumph” constituted,