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    The Recent Rise of LiteraryNonfiction: A Cautionary AssayDOUGLAS HESSE

    An additional special feature of the 1990 Convention will be a series ofsessions dedicated to reclaiming the literary status of he ess0'.Program of the 1990 ecce ConventionThe first to come as a group, of a desire sprung within themselves, they werethe first Americandemocracy-and it was they, in theend, who would succeedin making everything like themselves.William Carlos Williams, "Voyage of the Mayflower"

    Composition teachers and scholars should be wary of recent efforts tosettle the writing world for "literary nonfiction," especially when this projecthas, as yet, been so uncritically conceived. Convention, I know, dictates amore essayistically measured opening, and I promise reassuring qualifica-tions and uncertainties. But the land rush toward "the personal essay" hascome so furiously that there is a need for cautionary urgency.When this movement began depends on where you choose to stake thefirst claim. Perhaps in Dennis Rygiel's 1984 College English article, orRonald Weber's 1980 The Literature ofFact. Or Tom Wolfe's 1973 The NewJournalism, orRobert Scholes and Carl Klaus' 1969 Elements ofThe Essay.Perhaps in a textbook that devoted separate sections to "Logical Composi-tion" and "Literary Composition," and located the essay in the borderlandbetween them. That was Charles Sears Baldwin's 1902 College Manual ofRhetoric. Perhaps earlier: Samuel Newman's 1827Practical System ofRheto-ric, which included histories, letters, and essays among the five genres ofliterature. Beyond, of course, is Hugh Blair.It is apt, then, to speak of the current interest in literary nonfiction interms ofreclamation. That interest includes such works as Chris Anderson'sLiterary Nonfiction, Graham Good's The Observing Self, Alexander Butrym'sEssays on the Essay, W. Ross Winterowd's The Rhetoric of the "Other"Literature, several books in preparation, and articles in virtually all of theprofession's journals. There are undergraduate and graduate courses in thearea and textbooks for them. The past several CCCC meetings have featuredliving and breathing authors. In 1990 there were some eighteen sessionsdirectly related to literary nonfiction, most concerning the essay.

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    324 Journal ofAdvanced CompositionPerhaps the best sign ofany concept's having "arrived" is the possibilityand necessitythat theassumptions pushing it should be examined. In thecase

    of literary nonfiction, writing teachers should examine contentions that itsvarious genres offer the kind ofnatural and "student empowering" discoursethat more "academic" genres do not. To explain why, I'll discuss reasons forthe current interest in the essay as literature and examine positions voiced inseveral relatively recent articles.I should note that thecritique that follows comes from an insider. I havepublished essays in both Anderson's and Butrym's volumes, and I regularlylead a writing workshop in nonfiction prose. My own profesSional selfinterest, then, is in the continued ascendancy of the essay. However, I fearthat if we do not challenge some current assumptions, we stand strangelydisengaged from several important issues in rhetorical, genre, and culturaltheory. The result may be to insulate students from vital questions aboutrelationships among language, individualism, and discursive formation.While I quite favor students' reading and writing the sorts of texts generallycollected as "personal essays," the justification for doing so should besomething more than the naive celebration of "the literary."Motivations Nostalgic and TerritorialThree motives may account for the rise of interest in the essay asliterature. First, briefly, is the lureofnostalgia. I suspect that manyofuswereseduced by a certain way of studying literature before we were more powerfully seduced by rhetoric and composition. Our pasts were infused with thepleasuresofclose reading, interpretation, and the analysis of"finished texts."One effect ofdeclaring the essay as literature, then, is to invite compositionists occasionally to return to ouraestheticized roots. Such a return can be forgood or ill, depending on whether we ponder what we're up to and what itholds for our students.A second motivation is less nostalgic than territorial. To put it crassly,in a landscape crowded with scholars, one way to gain Schreibensraum is todeclare new territories open for colonization. Suddenly there are not onlyvirgin texts to explore but a virgin genre, not only countries but continents.And like early priests or prospectors, scholars who first stake claims will notonly publish more richly but also largely determine future citizenship in theterritory. To the ranks of The Leading Milton Scholar can be added TheLeading Dillard.Naming this territory by asserting the literariness of the essay is a gesturewith corporate as well as individual payoffs. In a by-now well-worn argument,Terry Eagleton points out that one function of labeling texts as literary is tojustify our attending to them. By announcing that what "literary scholars"can do with "their" texts (novels, plays, short stories, poems) "we" can dowith "ours" (essays, autObiographies, articles), compositionists seek, consciously or not, toenhance their sta tus in the profession. James Berlin argues

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    The Rise ofLiterary Nonfiction 325that positivistic rhetoric endures because literary interests have needed it:"To demonstrate the uniqueand privileged nature of poetictexts, it has beennecessary to insist on a contrasting set of devalorized texts" (28). It might bethe case that composition studies: similarly needs the category of "literarynonfiction" to assert its place in the hierarchyofdiscourse comprising themodern English department. As English departments became increasinglycentered on the interpretation oftexts, it became increasingly important forcompositionists to identify texts of their own.Butwhat does it mean in canon-shattered1991 toclaim a domain oftextsunder theflag ofliterariness? In his introduction toLiteraryNonfiction,ChrisAnderson observes that "the word literary masks all kinds of ideologicalconcerns, all kinds ofvalues, and is finally more a way of looking at a text, away of reading ... than an inherent property of texts" (ix). Anderson is right,of course, but there are important consequences that he doesn't pursue. (Imake the point not to fault Anderson's achievement in this introduction andthe book it precedes but to outline the intricate questions he has staged.) If"literary" is finally a way of reading, why is that way of reading "invited by"or, more properly, "deemed appropriate for" a certainclass of texts ? Anderson characterizes the various approaches in LiteraryNonfiction as "aesthetic,linguistic, rhetorical, formalist, psychoanalytical, poststructuralist, feminist,and deconstructionist" (x). Yet, these ways of reading can be performed onany text, the ability to do so depending not on the text itself but on theresourcefulness and inclination of the reader.Apologists for literary nonfictionmust confront the fact that, despite theplurality of reading strategies available, the name "literary nonfiction"signifies those texts apparently most susceptible to certain interpretivepractices. In otherwords, beforeany of thoseways of reading-which can allbe used with any text-can be performedwith a piece ofliterary nonfictionasliterary nonfiction, that piece must first be labeled as an appropriate objectof study. We should acknowledge that the way into this hermeneuticcyclotron is narrowly circumscribed. The assay of a nonfictional work'sliterariness is against an aesthetic Mohs scale, with lyric poetry at diamondand weather reports at talc. In terms of he personalessay, olderworks in thecanon consist, of course, of received texts that have demonstrated theirmettle in withstanding analysis: the works of Hazlitt, Lamb, Stevenson,Woolf, Orwell, and so on. Newly canonized essays (by Dillard, Didion,Hoaglund, Selzer, Thomas, Ehrlich, and so on) have, above all, "organicform," then surprising combinations of language, new juxtapositions ofexperience and readings and ideas, a vision and voice that are "personal"-butpersonal in just the appropriate ways. To belabor the point: a work does notbecome "literary nonfiction" because it supports, say, a psychoanalytical orany other kind of reading. Essays become literature as readers attribute toand recognize in them a certain aesthetic and way of constructing individualsubjectivity-that is, a particular voice and stance toward the world. The

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    326 Journal ofAdvanced Compositionterms "literary" and "aesthetic," as they have been used in relation to"literary nonfiction," are synonymous.The politics of canon formation is old news these days, but we incomposition studies must understand that its issues pertain to us, too. It isparticularly important that when we adopt stances no longer valorized forother genres we at least do so self-consciously. For example, it is no longerprofessionally sufficient to publish purely New Critical readings of shortstories, novels, and poems. But the declaration ofliterary nonfiction subtlyimplies that, since we're at an early stage in criticism of these genres, it ispossible, even necessary, to trace imagery and symbolism and argue for theaesthetic integrityand autonomy ofthework. To establish the literariness ofliterary nonfiction, the implication continues, we must be able to demonstrate that these works can sustain aesthetic readings. Such reasoning isreflected in comparisons of the essay's celebrated "organic form" to that ofthe lyricpoem. George Dillon aptly observes, "Wewill discover a great dealof good writingwhen we can find ways of esteeming it without estheticizingit" (209). The motivation for embracing these new ways extends beyondpolitical or theoretical correctness to pedagogy. For writing teachers, thereading of essays as an act of cracking aesthetic codes may hearken uncomfortably to pre-process, pre-reader-response, pre-social construction, prosemodel days, a concern John Clifford has underscored. Oneway to address itis to discard the "literary" measure of the worth of nonfiction tofocus insteadon more broadly rhetorical, cognitive, and pOlitical aspects. And, in fact,these dimensions have partially accounted for the rise of interest in theessay.Motivations Ideological and Power-FullThe third motivation for interest in the personal essay, an ideologicalone, is most clearly seen in the historical context in which it takes place, forthe phenomenon recapitulates issues contested in nineteenth and earlytwentieth-century English departments. The fall of rhetoric and the rise ofliterature, first at Harvard, then throughout American universities in the1880s and 18908, is a story familiarly told by Berlin and many others. Whathas not been fully explored is the role that literary nonfiction played inliterature's rise. At the same time that proponents of Hugh Blair's belletristic rhetoric were advocating the study of fine writing, English departmentswere being formed around the study of texts. The two strands, both emphasizing the analysis of completed works over the production of new ones,combined with Romantic views of the author, were synergistic in the rise ofliterature. Of course, it cannotbe argued that belletrism caused thedownfallof rhetoric and composition in nineteenth-century American colleges anymore than it can be argued that personal essays may undermine rhetoric incomposition studies today. And, of course, it's beyond the space ofthis essayto argue whether such a demise is good or bad. However, others have hintedat this prospect. James Slevin, for example, warns strongly against the

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    The Rise ofLiterary Nonfiction 327"literary appropriation of rhetoric" when he complains, somewhat unfairly,that Eagleton focuses on rhetoric in interpretation of texts rather than in thedevelopment of student writers (6-10). To the extent that emphasis on theinterpretation of nonfiction elides emphasis on its production, such fearsmaybe justifiable.The riseof he personal essay, then, might be seen as bu the fuller arrivalofefforts begun a century ago. But why now? The question is best answered,I think, as a backlash against postmodern theory, for the "personal essay"seems to offer a defensive position against threats to the autonomy ofindividual writers. For example, Donald Stewart has expressed many concerns about social constructionism. He scorns its failure to account forindividual genius and its reinforcement of academic discourse conventionsthat are obscurantist "rubbish" (67, 70). He argues for self-assertive individual prose that resists the potential for "totalitarian societies in which theindividual is completely subjected to the will of the group" (71, 74). Thepersonal essay, with its insistent declaration that "I am writing from mypersonal experience a piece that none other could write in just this way,"becomes a privileged genre in the resistance.In slightly different terms, this is the position that Kurt Spellmeyer takeswhen he warns that by reifying discourse communities we disempowerstudents. Spellmeyer embraces the essay as a "common ground" on whichstudents can meet and come to terms with the academy and its ideas. Hisargument is a strong one, and I will consider it closely. But first I should liketo point out some apparently paradoxical claims made for the essay. Weshould detect a rich discordance in, for example, Pat Hoy's being able tocelebrate the personal essay as holding values espoused by Matthew Arnoldand Cardinal Newman (288, 291) at the very same time that Jean-FrancoisLyotard declares "the essay is postmodern" (81).The weak argument for the personal essay as defense against socialconstructivism-embraced most directly in articles by Ross Winterowd,Lynn Bloom, and WilliamZeiger-beginsby accepting the genre as personalthought shaped organically. It celebrates the view articulated by SamuelJohnson and perpetuated throughout the historyof the genre that personalessays are relatively "formless" and thereby "pure," uncompromised and,most significantly, unconventionalized. As literature, the personal essaytriumphantly stands beyond the tyranny of form.In an analytic gesture common at least since Hugh Walker published TheEnglish Essay and Essayists in 1915, Ross Winterowd distinguishes in lACbetween "formal" and "informal essays." Students have been allowed toolong only to write the former, Winterowd argues, to the detriment of newideas and original thinking. Working with the same opposition, Zeigerclaims that the conventional academic essay artificially limits the thoughtsand feelings that students may express (210). In contrast, according toZeiger, the personal essay is unfettered and, most symptomatically, "natu-

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    The Rise ofLiterary Nonfiction 329

    Essays and EmpowermentUnderstanding that the personal essay is "open" only in particularwayssubstantially qualifies the claim that writing essays empowers students.Students are empowered byessaying. Butwe should be clear about how andto what extent.To begin this analysis, consider the contention that "students shouldhave the right not to be conclusive" (as they must be in formal essays) "butrather toexplore themselves and their world in informalessays" (Winterowd,"Essay"l46). There are two sources ofpower implied here, one inherent inthe genre but one dependent on the teacher's stance. There is, first, theepistemic power of exploration andnew combination, which like metaphor,creates by gathering and juxtaposing experiences, ideas, and texts, howeverimperfectly, that the student has not combined before. For the products ofthis exploration to be authorized,however, they must be accepted by anotheras sufficient. This acceptance is more than a matter of the author's desiringit. It is governed by the reader's perception of "fit" between theessay and theessay tradition, unless that reader is willing to suspend all judgment andaccept the text, whatever it is.Here I am at a crucial point, for we need to recognize two levels ofacceptance, and between them turns the trickiest problem of the power ofliterary nonfiction.At one level, teachers may simply grant the student's right to explore,viewing the products of that explorationwith full tolerance, as they normallymight journalS or first drafts. At this level, "personal essay" becomes lessform than mode, collapsing into something like Britton's expressive dis-course, writing whose aim is the author's homesteading for her or himself aplot oflanguage. Acceptance at this level consists of teachers evaluating notthe quality of the performance but its existence. Anything goes so long as itgoes (who, after all, can judgeeven "effort" without comparing the performance to existing texts?),and the student is empowered with the right to speak.But speaking and having one's words accepted as well-formed or significantare two very different things-the difference, in fact, between Britton's ex-pressive and poetic discourse. There are quite differentkinds of power held,then, by two students who publicly receive equally positive responses forhaving essayed, but one of whose texts the teacher privately regards as"clichM, unoriginal, and boring," the other's as "insightful, well-written, andstimulating."

    This brings me to the second level of acceptance and power, the level atwhich questions of genre and "literariness" impinge. As soon as teachersraise the issue ofquality, ofwhat even constitutes a personalessay, they createthe need for a comparative standard. The measure of "quality" entails aholding of "this against that." To rally around essays as literary Objects is toassert that standards of measure in composition courses should include

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    330 Journal ofAdvanced Compositionworks whose aims are aesthetic and experiential, not only those whose aimsare rational and transactional. I wholly embrace this effort.But consider carefully wherein power lies. An essay is successfullyliterary only if the larger category, literature, exists. Hermeneutics notwithstanding, works cannot assert their own literariness except in relation toother works. Power lies not in the author's freedom but in her or hisproducing a text recognizable as an appropriate move in the language gameof essaying.Lest I be criticized for too-narrowly using "the literary status of theessay" to argue that power at the second level is gained only throughfavorable comparisons ofstudent texts to "literature," I assert thatmy claimis a more general one. For example, the quality of a student's "exploratorytext" is determined by comparisons of it to previously-written "exploratorytexts." The text in question must bear at least some family resemblance, touse Wittgenstein's concept, to other texts to which it is compared. WhenSpellmeyer argues thatwe should have students "bring to bear" extra-textualknowledge on texts (something I quite agree with), this bearing does not takeplace in a vacuum. Spellmeyer himself notes that we must provide studentswith strategies for using this knowledge. Mastering the genre of personalessay, its topoi and rhythms and stances, involves no moreor less the practiceof conventions than learning to write lab reports.

    Let me elaborate and then qualifymy citing of"conventions," for I, too,fear the new foundational ways in which discursive formations have beeninvoked to preserve the status quo. Spellmeyer discusses a student whowrites successfully about an essayby Sartre. He cites the student's beginninghertext with a story ofa diseased pet rat as a sign ofher ability to hold Sartre"in abeyance . . . in order to consider the text of her experience in a new light. .. Retrospectively she realizes that her own behavior could be explained inexistential terms" ("Common" 274). Such an analysis misstates what thisstudent writer has achieved. She has crafted a text whose arrangementsuggests that she analyzed her experience retrospectively and "naturally" outofherreading ofSartre. But the assignment, after all, was to read and respondto Sartre's essay,not to write about experience and see where this leads. I saythis neither to diminish the student's achievement nor to question Spellmeyer's preference for this piece over the other he quotes. Instead, I want tocorrect his interpretation ofwhat the "Dying Rat" author has done. She hasemployed a strategy ofpersonal essays-namely, she has delayed contextualizing the significanceofa personal experience. As teachers we prize the moveshe has made because it matches our expectations of the essay tradition inwhich such moves are made.Now for the qualification. Drawing on Gadamer's theory of method,Spellmeyer rejects a view of conventions as "static schemata," a view which"obscures both the historical character of knowledge and its openness to thepresent" ("Kurt" 335). In doing so, he is right to assertthe futility ofpinning

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    The Rise ofLiterary Nonfiction 331down discourse with unchanging rules. He is even right to locate in historicitythe possibility for students to produce "new" texts. But the theoretical shiftfrom "conventions" to "historicity," however correct, does not neatly transform the situation in which readers read texts, especially when they arerequired to make judgments. Spellmeyer is right to speculate that

    ifwe permittedour students, not only freshman writers but undergraduates at all levels,tojoin inourongoingconversations-to talk with ourtcxtsin theirown language, withoutforcing themselves to speak aswe speak, or to think as we think-thevoices that havegiven us ourwords would gradually infuse their speech as well. ("Kurt" 336)There are pragmatic limitations to this pedagogy of immersion; we teach insixteen-week terms or, at most, four-year spans of writing across the curriculum. But these concern me less than the implications of the essay as essay forachieving the writing ends of "open" student participation in our discourse.By invoking any genre, any corpus of prototypical texts-regardless of themerits of that genre over any other, including the formal academic essay-onenecessarily and, in this case, paradoxicallydraws the writing borders inwhichstudents might mosteasily dwell. Is theessay the genre most like the languagestudents bring to the course? No,at least not the "essayas literature," not theessay of Lewis Thomas or Annie Dillard or E.B. White. The essay does notbecome "natural discourse" simply by asserting it as such.Toward Reflective StewardshipTo the writing of literary nonfiction is attributed a third power, that ofmotivation. Before our studentswe dangle like a fat dew worm the prospectof becoming E.B. White, trying to hook them into the larger boat ofdiscourse. Lynn Bloom makes this argument most directly. The extent towhich she is right-and my own experience suggests that she is-is largely areflection of how the ideologies of literary nonfiction mirror the culture inwhich it is taught and read. Literary nonfiction is motivating because itsounds chords of the romance of writing, of the value of aesthetic sensibility,of the rugged individual, of a Frederick Jackson Turner style open frontier ofdiscourse. There is a quandary for teachers here. By presenting theseideologies as the case for all writing (which I can imagine no one seriouslyadvocating), they would risk reinforcing in students a questionably romanticview of writing. But the alternative, relegating these texts to a special classof leisured writing, marginalizes the genre.What, then, to do with "the literary status of the essay," a concept so ripefor deconstruction? I'm tempted to advocate a double stance, oneas scholarsand one as teachers. It is not asking much to realize how messy ourtheoretical house is. As scholars we cannot claim the literariness of somenonfiction and simultaneously ignore literary theory at large, dismissingquestions of agency, subjectivity, intertextuality, and ideology. We cannotderide current theory and act as ifliterary nonfiction behaves differently. But

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    332 Journal ofAdvanced Compositionto what extent shouldwe bring this theory into the classroom? Is there somevalue in critiquing, in our offices and journals, the concept of literarynonfiction at the same timewe preserve, in our classrooms and assignments,the enabling fictions of "personal experience" and "individual voice" and"natural form" and "freedom from conventions"? As a way of mediatingthese, Schilb turns to Gerald Graffs solution of "teaching the controversy."But such a solution, while perhaps in the best rhetorical tradition, is unsatisfying in the way that meta-pedagogies tend finally to be.In a 1988 essay Chris Anderson concedes the postmodern position thatstable meaning is impossible. In light of that, Anderson argues that

    the game that the essay wantsus to play isjust as valid as any other. It doesn't necessarilyclaim that the ontological questions aren't there. Itsimply says, for now they don't apply.Fornow joinwith me in assuming certain things andwe can get a good deal ofwork done.("Hearsay" 307)

    I've considered his point a good deal recently and think Anderson is right toacknowledge the need to "get on with things," thereby escaping both paralysis and paralogy, acknowledging the need for purposeful action. And yet I donot comfortably embrace his Carlylean consolation that getting "a good dealof work done" is sufficient, especially when a consequence might be construed as the end of debate on the essay's status. We should continue to havestudents write "personal essays," but not because the genre is natural,organiC, free, or inherently more empowering than other genres. We shouldrecognize that as we colonize the genre, we seek to convert our students, too,as all teaching must inevitably. But we mustn't narrowly convert them to aliterary aesthetic that focuses on the essay as Object and casts its authors asunfettered individual voices. The power we hold out to students when weencourage them to essay is the power to be like other essayists, to write likeauthors their teachers read in serious leisure. I fwe read critically and selfcritically, that does not seem a bad prospect.

    Works Cited

    Illinois State UniversityNorma4 Illinois

    Anderson, Chris, ed. Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Crilicism, Pedagogy. Carbondale: SouthernIllinois UP, 1989.- . "Hearsay Evidence and Second-Class Citizenship." College English SO (1988): 300-08.Baldwin, Charles Sears. Co/lege ManualofRhetoric. London: Longmans, Green, 1902.Berlin, James A Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985.Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

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    The Rise ofLiterary Nonfiction 333Bloom, Lynn, Z. "Why Don't We Write WhatWe Teach? And Publish It?" JournalofAdvancedComposition 10 (1990): 87-100.Britton, James. "Spectator Role and the Beginnings of Writing." Prospect and Retrospect:Selected Essays of ames Britton. Ed. Gordon M. Pradl. Upper Montclair: Boynton, 1982.46-67.Butrym, Alexander, ed. Essays on the Essay. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1989.Clifford, John. "The Reader's Text: Responding to Loren Eiseley's "'The Running Man.'''Anderson 247-61.Dillon, George L. "Fiction in Persuasion: Personal Experience as Evidence and as Art."Anderson 197-210.Eagleton, Teny. Literary Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.Good, Graham. The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay. London: Routledge, 1988.Hoy, Pat. "Students and Teachers Under the Influence: Image and Idea in the Essay." Anderson287-300.Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodem Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. GeoffBennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.Miller, Susan. "Comment on 'A Common Ground: The Essayin Academe.'" College English 52(1990): 330-34.Newman, Samuel P. A Practical System ofRhetoric. 7th ed. Andover,MA: Gould, 1839.Rygiel, Dennis. "On the NeglectofTwentieth-Century Nonfiction: A Writing Teacher's View."College English 47 (1984): 392-400.Schilb, John. "Deconstructing Didion: Poststructuralist Rhetorical Theory in the CompositionClass." Anderson 262-86.Slevin, James. "Genre Theory, Academic Discourse, and Writing within Disciplines." AuditsofMeaning: A Festschrift in Honor ofAnne E. Bertholf. Ed. Louise Z. SmIth. Portsmouth:Boynton, 1988. 3-16.Spellmeyer, Kurt. "ACommon Ground: The Essay in the Academy." College English 51 (1989):262-76.- . "Kurt Spellmeyer Responds." College English 52 (1990): 334-38.Stewart, DonaldC. "Collaborative Learning and Composition: BoonorBane?" RhetoricReview7 (1988): 58-83.Weber, Ronald. The Literature ofFact: Literary Nonfiction in American Writing. Athens: OhioUP, 1980.Wolfe, Thomas. "The New Journalism." The New Journalism. Ed. Thomas Wolfe and E.W.Johnson. New York: Harper, 1973. 3-52.Winterowd, W. Ross. "Rediscovering the Essay." Journal ofAdvanced Composition 8 (1988):146-57.- . The Rhetoric of he "Other" Literature. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990.Witlgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 3rd ed. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. NewYork: Macmillan, 1958.Zeiger, William. "The Circular Journey and the Natural Authority of Form." Rhetoric Review8 (1990): 208-19.