Writing Theory and Critical Theory ed. by John Clifford and John Schilb (review)

182Rocky Mountain Review Patriarchy," essential reading for all who would work in defense of "Mother" Earth. The book also contains some well-developed readings of individual writers, such as Joy Harjo, Patricia Hempl, and Ursula Le Guin, none of whom receive mention in Buell's study. As a scholarly book, Nature, Literature, and Other is original Eind provocative in its choice of subject matter . Whereas the overall importance of ecofeminism to literary studies remains to be seen, this book will stand as a worthy contribution to that endeavor. The publication of these two volumes by major university presses will be welcomed by the growing number of scholars devoted to the study of literature 's relation to the environment, yet one must also wonder how such books will be received by our colleagues in the sciences, especially those in the discipline of Ecology. As literary scholars, in this case "ecocritics" and "ecofeminists," invoke the authority of science to further their own moral and political agenda (i.e., environmentalism), new standards of critical accuracy Eire bound to arise. And what will readers outside of the academy make of these latest academic projects? When a scholEirly book insists upon its relevance to the wider world—as both these books do in regard to our culture's relationship to the environment—this too begs new standEirds. JOHN P. O'GRADY Boise State University JOHN CLIFFORD and JOHN SCHILB, eds. Writing Theory and Critical Theory. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1994. 374 p. 1 he editors of this third volume in the MLA's Research and Scholarship in Composition series admit in their comprehensive introduction that the submissions represent a diverse range of topics and perspectives. Clifford and Schilb provide a glimpse of a profession still defining itself. They find unity in diversity by connecting not just writing theory and critical theory, but theory and pedagogy, theory and politics, theory and theorists. Part 1, "Refiguring Traditions," examines the history of composition studies and various perspectives that help us define where we have been and where we need to go. Susan Miller sets the tone in the first essay, "Composition as a Cultural Artifact: Rethinking History as Theory," by reminding us of the cultural and social conditions that led to the growth of composition. Specifically, the need to educate large numbers of workingclass students and to evaluate and exclude those who failed to assimilate the vernacular of the "cultured" class led to the emphasis on mechanical correctness which still gives composition "its particularly bourgeois yet marginalized , conventional but palpably unpleasant, flavor" (20). Theory, then, becomes a way for us to help ourselves and our students move beyond this limiting view of composition, a way for us to communicate what we are doing in our courses and what more we could be doing. If we Eire to achieve Book Reviews183 unity as a profession, Miller argues, we must find a way to write our history , to tell the story of where our profession has been, to examine its cultuTEd Eind social influences. "Until we do," Miller asserts, "we will not have a genuinely new paradigm for composition that replaces its originEd division of good Eind bad writing with our new expertise in historicizing, theorizing, and teaching students to enjoy the variable relations of writers to their texts" (32). In a move typical of the structure of this volume, the editors follow Miller's essay with one by Kathleen McCormick which looks at the way many college texts present a typical research paper assignment. It is this kind of juxtaposition on the part of the editors and the contributors that makes Writing Theory and Critical Theory such a thorough, sensible account of the way critical theory and writing theory converge. Essay by essay, it examines how deconstruction, cultural studies, feminism, postmodernism , psychoanalysis, socíeü constructionism, reader response, and other theories influence writing theory and pedagogy. Suzanne Clark points out the importance of looking at what our theories exclude, as well. Her essay, "Rhetoric, Social Construction, and Gender: Is it Bad to Be Sentimental?" examines the academic exclusion of emotion (discarded as "sentimentEdity") in favor of reason, which she asserts is an unnatural and unnecessary opposition. Not...