The Tidy House: Basic Writing in the American Curriculum

Abstract

I found my career in basic writing. I got my start there and, to a degree, helped to construct and protect a way of speaking about the undergraduate curriculum that has made “basic writing” an important and necessary, even an inevitable, term. This is a story I love to tell.

T he unrecognized contradiction within a position that valorizes the concrete experience of the oppressed, while being so uncritical about the historical role of the intellectual, is maintained by a verbal slippage.

— Gayatri Spivak “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

Remember, in Foucault’s passage in his History of Sexuality: “ One must be a nominalist.” Power is not this, power is not that. Power is the name one must lend to a complex structure of relationships. To that extent, the subaltern is the name of the place which is so displaced from what made me and the organized resister, that to have it speak is like Godot arriving on a bus. We want it to disappear as a name so that we can all speak.

— Gayatri Spivak, In an Interview with Howard Winant, “Gayatri Spivak on the Politics of the Subaltern.”