Whose house is it, anyway? Lunsford and Ede decide.

This week’s reading brought the old “master’s tools” argument to fore once more. In thinking about the hierarchical versus the dialogic, it seems to me that these readings once again claim that our rules, our very genres, are stifling the students we are supposed to inspire to find their “voice,” whatever that word might turn out to be. In “Crimes of Writing and Reading,” Lunsford and Ede start off with a veritable who’s who of women in rhetoric. This seems very hierarchical. They aim to examine the righteous stance of “right” writing and reading and tear it down, ending their argument with questions. Perhaps most importantly, they write that “we cannot know how students will experience various rhetorics” (313). In other words, as Audrey Lorde told us before, the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house. Lunsford and Ede bait us to bait our students to play with language, reminding us that some will find this as intimidating as others do strict rules and rubrics. We no more can give writers a rubric than we can give them no tools at all. Somehow, we must give them the tools to create their own tools.

Of the two examples of writing “criminals,” I find Smith to be the worse criminal, despite her acclaim. Acker is using the forms of others, true, but Smith is using the voice of others—going so far as to become her victims on stage. At least she admits it’s stealing (317). If she were but putting others’ stories down, if, as the Pulitzer committee said, others could act out what she had created (created? Or scribed?), it would seem more like a collaboration. The work is apparently powerful, so something must be working right.

In learning poetry, we are told that you have to learn the rules before you break them. In charting a tradition of women in rhetoric, Lunsford and Ede seem to be making an attempt to build the master’s house. Yet at the end of the essay they claim “it is possible to trace the forces surrounding this particular debate all the way back to the many struggles over use of vernacular experience in the West, and certainly to the beginnings of American experience” (323). That’s a lot of history not covered, for their who’s who starts in 1990. There are many rules, many voices, unaccounted for. And just how we are to learn the rules or break them remains unclear.

Questions:

1.If Smith is the only one who can perform her pieces, who is the master of the house?

2.Lunsford and Ede cite the Ya-Ya Sisterhood phenomenon and the Oprah book club as examples of readers being scripted upon. Others believe that any time people pick up a book, it is good, no matter how good the book. Is it all a matter of where you find your indoctrination?