Linda Brodkey

Writing Ethnographic Narratives.

This essay examines narrative choices in experimental (interpretive) and traditional (analytical) ethnographies. The material covered includes probability in quantitative and qualitative research; ethnographic narratives as ways of knowing and telling about the world; perspective as a consequence of both narrative stance and narrative voice; and the economics of producing interpretations and analyses in academic prose. Underlying the argument is the assumption that decisions ethnographers make about what to tell and how to tell it are influenced by to whom they plan to tell it and under what circumstances. Hence the ethnographers narrative dilemma glosses over the epistomological crisis that authorship raises for the social sciences, namely, whether the researcher or the research method is telling the story.

The Second Stage in Writing across the Curriculum

Writing across the curriculum (WAC) is on one hand practical composition pedagogy and on the other an adventure into the uses of written language outside the primrose paths of belles lettres where we were so willingly led by Hugh Blair and George Campbell, who promised us class mobility and respectable cultivation. As was the case with Blair and Campbell, the pedagogic motive of WAC comes first, but the success of the pedagogic task in the long run depends on the success of the scholarly, critical task. The four books under review here mark the end of the first stage of WAC, driven by the missionary zeal of composition and the institutional designs of administrators looking for broad structural fixes, and the beginning of the next stage, based on a realistic assessment of the roles written language actually takes in disciplines and disciplinary classrooms. As essay after essay in the useful volume Strengthening Programs for Writing Across the Curriculum attests, familiar assumptions about composition have been challenged by the realities of classrooms across the curriculum and the in-

Tropics of Literacy

Definitions of literacy are explored as tropes which invariably express a social relationship between self and other. Hence, definitions project the cultural terms on which the literate members of a society wish to live with those deemed to be illiterate. The essay raises questions about the illiterate other being defined by current definitions of adult literacy.