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Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
Students do not live by reason alone, not even in composition classes; nor do teachers live by reason alone, not even in composition classes. Yet most if not all composition teachers, theorists,
and administrators agree, quite rightly, that the most important task of first-year writing courses at American colleges and universities is to engage students in critical thinking. The course functions as an introduction to the discourses of reason, their reflective distance, their rules of presentation and disputation, their demands for rigorous form and precise language. Since all students with few exceptions typically take the course, it is the gatekeeper class for competency in the rational use of language. In other words, reason is the lingua franca of adult, professional, public life. Each of us defines or discovers who we are in part within the “space” opened by that language. Composition students are often just beginning this process of self-definition/self-discovery, or at least beginning at a new, higher level of maturity and expectation.
Yet students do not live by reason alone. Their experience in composition typically involves what I will call here the “affect of reason,” which is to say a whole complex of often unreasonable emotions. This is not even counting the emotions associated with leaving home, discovering themselves, and emerging from adolescent fog, in the context of which composition class is barely a blip on the emotional screen. Yet as anyone who has taught—or taken—composition knows, students also respond specifically to the discourses of reason, and they respond emotionally. They feel confused, or insecure, or confident; they are indifferent, or disdainful, or surprised; they show fear or determination, sometimes anger or pride, sometimes even joy and wonder. Moreover, at stake in their engagement with reason is not simply their competency, their grade, their academic career