Postmodern Turn in Composition Studies

According to Lester Faigley, despite postmodernism, what is considered good writing is still modernist in style and approach. Often postmodernism is criticized by cultural studies because of its antifoundational approach without offering authority for political or social change. Faigley argues that there can be a postmodern ethics, in which justice is always localized and based on kairos, recognizing the specific time and place of an issue without automatically generalizing for other situations. Postmodernism can look at unequal power relations and how they are historically produced. Faigley one way this can take place in the composition classroom is through online discussion where power is destabilized and oppressive structures can be analyzed from a postmodern stance.

Stanley Fish also is concerned with how to provide foundations for a postmodern ethical stance and he argues that foundations are possible, at least contingently, through rhetorical persuasion. This is necessary because, as Louis Phelps points out, composition inhabits a postmodern world. Interpretation is one of the main goals of composition studies as a result of the postmodern turn. Gary Olson confirms this view when he argues that histories should be revisited to understand how composition theory figures into the composition classroom.

One way we see the postmodern turn within the composition classroom is in Kay Halasek's question, "how do we move beyond the constructs that now dominate our thinking in composition studies?" To do this, students must consider their relative positions in culture and self-consciously consider how their position in culture necessitates revisioning. For Halasek, dialogic paradigms serve as a model for a conversation between competing pedagogies and model a postcritical position.

The postmodern turn can also be seen in how students write about their selves, such as in Thomas Newkirk's argument that writing itself is performance or a construction of a possible self to an audience. The self is constructed and performed to the society that is its readers. This self is a social postmodern construction, not the modern private style that Faigley critiques. Understanding this performative aspect of the postmodern turn means that students writing can provide a window into discourses that hold power in the wider culture. Without the postmodern turn, the self that is presented could not be examined to determine which ways it has been social constructed.

Thomas Kent extends this argument when he challenges us to recognize that the writing act is always public, subject to varying interpretations and always situated and can't be reduced to a generalizable process. This postmodern turn rejects the notion that you can control language or that writing is simply a tool. Therefore, the postmodern turn precludes a "big theory" representation of composition studies.