404
PARTISAN REVIEW
p rofess ional mani pul ators of these subl angu ages . Coll ege facul ties
appear to students to be the kgitimate authoriti es on the thought in a
particular discipline. Getting good grades th erefore becomes an act of
mimi cry, of imitati on of the teacher/ p rofess ional. Students, especiall y
if they enter college trul y margin all y litera te, develo p the idea of
literacy as the mere adequate adapta tion to a packaged ritual of
express ions appropria te to a given set of issu es, pro blems, and ma teri–
als . The use o f language is not therefore a refl ection of p a tterns of
autonomous thinking or an alytical or criti cal processes. Ra ther, it is a
far more superfi cial effort of imitative performance, where the student
responds no t dial ecticall y in argument or debate, but by modeling
language use upo n es tablish ed printed authoriti es or on li ving role
models in the coll ege cl assroom .
The process o f learning langu age by imita ti on at the coll ege level
might no t appear to merit concern . After all , in European secondary
schoo ls, French
lycees
and German
gymnasia,
advanced literacy has
tradition all y been taught o ften through ri gid models o f
explication de
texte
whi ch require a structured p rocess of imitati on by the student.
This approach has been compared unfavorabl y w ith th e Am er ican
penchant for encouraging among students a more expressive crea ti ve
use of language without a fixed p attern of responses to ass ign ed texts
and issues in the classroom. However, the crucial difference is tha t the
encounter by the student with a text in the European sense requires a
p erson all y wrought expli ca tion and summary of th at text. No ma tter
how imitative the format of tha t effort, it still req uires acti ve reading
and an alyti c thinking.
In
contras t to the cl ass ic
explication de tex te,
the
imitation fos tered in the American cl ass room is essenti all y an emul a–
tion of style. A student is rewarded for skill in express ing himself or
h erself in the sophistica ted and p rofess ion al style of, for exam p le, a
psycho logist or socio logist. The act of imita ti on encouraged in the
contemporary coll ege cl assroom avo ids a cr iti cal individual encounter
with arguments and thoughts-with content. A's on papers are g iven
more for the imita tive accuracy of rhetorical style and techni cal mod es
of discourse. The student is shielded from the demand tha t he or she
absorb and recas t, in common language, the content of a book , an
articl e, a debate, or an issue.
As a result, the more sophistica ted and successful the student , the
more adept he or she becomes a t this imita ti ve literacy.
If
and when the
student goes on to gradua te schoo l or p rofess ional education , this
process of imita tion becomes highl y refined .
It
is reinforced by an
intense peer profess ion alism . The Ph .D. di sserta ti on is one of th e mos t
imita tive of acts, a ritu alized obeisance to authorita tive traditi on-not
