For we know not what we write: Critical thinking, style, and the university's discourse.

摘要

Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., Mark Bracker, and others advocate that writing teachers appropriate Lacanian psychoanalysis into their composition classrooms. They suggest that teachers perform the role of a psychoanalyst in order to help their students unblock the precluded forms of thought that disrupt the critical writing process. However, the psychoanalytic process of working through a student's resistance inevitably produces aggression and/or other emotions that can disrupt a classroom environment. Although this process is always at work in any critical environment and a teacher's application of psychoanalytic techniques can mitigate the subsequent effects, this dissertation rethinks the psychoanalytic framework for the composition classroom. Instead of the teacher's playing the role of the psychoanalyst, why not devise an assigned reader from the students' writing that plays that role on the teacher's behalf? Not only will the students redirect their fantasies to the implied reader, but an assigned reader can serve as a more effective mediator since it is purified of the teacher's non-psychoanalytic responsibilities, such as grading. In other words, the internality of an assigned reader can facilitate a writer's critical-thinking skills and grammatical style better than an external teacher can.