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4 C o m p o s i t i o n S t u d i e s as a K i n d o f C o u n t e r p u b l i c Style performs membership. —Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics A few years back, in a review of The Trouble with Principle, Terry Eagleton (2000) opens with a scathing (albeit tongue-in-cheek) appraisal of Stanley Fish’s liberal credentials. “It is one of the minor symptoms of the mental decline of the United States,” writes Eagleton, “that Stanley Fish is thought to be on the Left.” This statement is followed by a pronouncement wherein Eagleton unceremoniously dubs Fish “the Donald Trump of American academia, a brash, noisy entrepreneur of the intellect who pushes his ideas in the conceptual marketplace with all the fervor with which others peddle second-hand Hoovers.” Eagleton wonders how it happened that Stanley Fish came to be seen, at once, as street fighter and boardroom bully, as revolutionary provocateur and latterday Churchillian defender of the realm. As Eagleton views things, this apparent balancing act between Little Fish and Big Fish—between “the saber-rattling polemicist” and “the respectable academic”—is rather something of a smokescreen. For what’s being juggled here is not a leftwing Stanley Fish versus a right-wing Stanley Fish but rather two renditions of conservative thinking that, in the end, do not differ all that much from one another. For those of us who recall his lively debates with Dinesh D’Souza, the Stanley Fish sketched by Eagleton could only be a caricature. Fish, after all, was something of a culture hero for many of us, if only because he could ward off (with such enviable dispatch, I might add) what was then the latest front in the conservative assault on the university: political correctness . Never mind, as Eagleton (2000) points out, that Fish does not seem particularly interested in such global issues as “forced migration, revolutionary nationalism, military aggression, the depredations of capital ,” and so on. Never mind, as Eagleton further observes, that the neopragmatism embraced by Fish seems to countenance, at best, a kind of parochialism, an interest in matters strictly limited to the domestic and, Composition Studies as a Kind of Counterpublic   133 especially, academic realms. No, at the end of the day, such incongruities simply did not matter as much as the fact that we in the academy had, at long last, discovered a compelling spokesperson, a champion who could effectively address right-wing criticisms of the work we do. Fish even seemed able to ease our worries that D’Souza’s criticisms might be ones shared by the public at large. I was reminded of those debates, and of Eagleton’s comments, in reading Paul Butler’s (2008) “Style and the Public Intellectual: Rethinking Composition and the Public Sphere.” Butler opens with his own Fish story, this one ensuing from a 2005 op-ed that Fish wrote for The New York Times, “Devoid of Content.” In his piece, Fish advances the notion that content has absolutely no place in the composition classroom. What matters—and the only thing that matters to Fish—is form, by which he apparently means grammatical form, especially form defined as syntax. Anything beyond form is pretext and pretense, a “lure and a delusion” that must be gotten rid of if we are to teach students how to write “a clear and coherent sentence” (Fish 2005). And for Fish, learning how to write that sentence is, apparently, the only legitimate reason for composition courses to exist in the first place. Still, Butler is not so much interested in arguing with Fish about the nature of the composition curriculum. Butler’s questions are larger and, I think, ultimately more revealing ones: How is it that Stanley Fish— along with Louis Menand, Heather MacDonald, and others—speaks for composition studies in the public sphere when those of us trained in the discipline do not? By what authority? To what purpose? And exactly who is it that Fish is writing for? This last question proves especially interesting , for, as Butler points out, Fish had basically made the same argument three years earlier in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Why, then, did the first article elicit so little comment but the second provoked considerable indignation, especially among compositionists? The obvious explanation, and one that Butler acknowledges, was that Fish was writing for two very different audiences—the first...

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