Into the Field: Sites of Composition Studies ed. by Anne Ruggles Gere (review)

92Rocky Mountain Review stardom should be—and would be, if not for the maddeningly self-gratulatory lurchings of his prose—indispensable for an understanding of such literary and cultural phenomena as Stendhal, Nietzsche, Wilde, Genet, Mailer, Elvis, David Bowie, Thomas Pynchon, and Michael Jackson. For they are all, with more or less success, "Byronic": stretched or crucified between the irreconcilable extremes of performance as self-expression and performance as self-commodification. As Christensen maps Byron's career—with, I think, absolute accuracy— the poet progresses from an early ambivalence about his writing/self to a false resolution of that tension in Childe Harold and especially the Oriental tales, through a reassessment of selfhood in the dramas, to a final and triumphant victory over his "marketed" identity in Don Juan. Nobody—not even McGann—has written more perceptively about that great poem, the only comic masterpiece (saving, maybe, Finnegans Wake) in the language. There, he argues, Byron found at last a public voice so mocking of the very idea of "publicity," a performative self so deliberately and subversively antiperformative , a way of being "Byron" so non-"Byronic," that it is, to all intents and purposes, a new form of self-consciousness, as bracing as it is bitter. Christensen leaves us with the image of an eternally victorious, because eternally self-caricaturing, Byron, "the lordly hack laughing at the ghastly figure he has cut before us" (363). I know of no summary of Byron more eloquent than this. Alas: because, through so much of the book, Christensen so painfully (in every sense) struggles to garotte his own natural eloquence. For all my deep admiration of Byron's Strength, I mean this charge very seriously. That contemporary criticism is in rotten shape, about as creative and humane as fourteenth-century Scholasticism, would be denied by nobody except its hermetic, nattering-to-one-another-over-their-word-processor adepts. And it is trahison des clercs. There is no excuse, as Auden said, for not writing well; and Christensen is an especially regrettable casualty of the current rage for obfuscation. In a saner intellectual climate—in a more honest intellectual climate—he would have written a much more valuable book. FRANK McCONNELL University ofCalifornia, Santa Barbara ANNE RUGGLES GERE, ed. Into the Field: Sites of Composition Studies. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1993. 222 p. Anne Ruggles Gere has assembled twelve substantial essays which together attempt to define composition studies through its relationships and intersections with other fields of inquiry. Although her title alludes to the long-standing discussion about self-definition in the field of composition Book Reviews93 studies, these writers do not worry about the disciplinary status of composition . Gere proposes the metaphor "restructuring" to suggest that the field of composition studies, as it is discussed in these essays, reconceives the field by deconstructing the received boundaries between it and other fields such as literature (especially reader-response theory and deconstruction), linguistics , cognitive and developmental psychology, and rhetoric. Here "field" is meant as a charged space in which multiple "sites" of interaction appear. Gere argues that "composition theory resists boundaries and blurs distinctions between disciplines. Instead of simply borrowing from a given field, it interacts, changing and being changed" (3). Gere's introduction, a valuable contribution in itself to understanding the relationships between composition studies and other intellectual traditions , should be a stopping place for any readers who are not familiar with contemporary work in composition or with other work by the authors of the essays. The essays themselves are divided into two sections. In Part 1, "The Philosophical Turn," six essays look at the relationships between philosophical traditions and composition studies, especially hermeneutics. In doing so, the essays explore the terrain in which composition and literature or cultural studies can be understood to be connected, and how philosophy informs composition. For those in composition, these six essays can raise the level of discussion about such issues as the relationship ofpersonal and academic writing, of researchers and teachers, and of theory and practice. Kurt Spellmeyer's opening essay draws parallels between recent developments in contemporary anthropology and those in composition. His historical account traces the development of composition since the...