Subversion and affiliation

When I arrived at the 2019 Conference on College Composition and Communication, after settling into my hotel, the first thing I did was look over the titles and abstracts of the over 800 presentations. One word emerged as a widely-shared theme and assumed value: subversion.

No one here seems to think there's any need to justify the value of subversion, its ultimacy is assumed. I cannot help but notice the irony of university faculty at a professional conference -- a manifestation of the stability and success of established institutions and hierarchies -- seeing themselves as subversive.

A couple years before I attended the MLA’s annual conference, and Rita Felski, in her keynote address, wondered about the central place that the word “subversive” had assumed in English and related disciplines. She noted the difficulty of identifying with a wholly negative concept and of limiting our understanding of reading to this negation. But, that’s how many of us have learned to talk to students about reading; “read against the grain,” we keep telling them. But is not most of the reading and writing we do about constructing meaningful connections, rather than dismantling them?

I had the pleasure of hearing Joseph Harris speak at the 4Cs, while my mind was percolating on this idea of subversion. In his talk, which was part of a panel celebrating the influential career of David Bartholemae, Harris focused on the deeply meaningful connections that Bartholemae had helped him to construct, a love of the “sentences” that Bartholemae always told his students to write, and of teaching and collaboration. It wasn’t subversion he was talking about, it was connecting. It reminded me of what Felski had said in her talk a couple of years beofre (and published in Uses of Literature), “through this experience of affiliation, I feel myself acknowledged; I am rescued from the fear of invisibility, from the terror of not being seen.”

The ubiquity of subversion in the 4Cs program reminded me Harris’s 1989 essay in CCC, “The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing” in which, he examines the word “community” precisely because it “seems never to be used unfavorably.” Harris borrows this phrase and approach from Raymond Williams’s Keywords (another affiliation — Harris nearly always defines his ideas by affiliations). The word subversion seems to presently have a similarly unquestioned value within my discipline.

To be fair, I imagine it gained this position because of the sort of concerns Felski articulated so well — a concern for those who have become invisible, whose worth has not been acknowledged, overlooked because we valued something else. Attention, like a spotlight, has a finite scope and if we shine the spotlight of our attention on writers and texts that have been marginalized, that is a kind of subversion. That’s quite valuable a thing to do. But, like Felski, I think too much of a focus on subversion, though, seem to me to create other problems.

Paula McQuade in the conclusion of her 2011 article "Household Religious Instruction in 17th C England and America" makes this brilliant observation, illustrating how an obsession with "subversion" can slant the picture of the past in a way that strangely blinds those who are keen to recover the literature produced by women of the past to a very great deal of the actual writing that was done by early modern women.

“During the past several decades scholars have turned to nonliterary and archival texts to help us understand the lives and work of early modern women writers. We have certainly learned from these accounts. But why have Fiske and her text remained obscure? Of course, the recovery of early modern women writers is dependent upon many variables. Margaret Ezell has shown how a reliance upon established literary genres prevented early researchers from grasping the depth and variety of texts by women in early modern England. I would add that politics has also helped determine which writers are “recovered.” Unlike the English Quaker prophetess Ana Trapnel or Anne Hutchinson, Sarah Fiske did not challenge traditionally masculine forms of religion or government. This scholarly lack of interest in orthodox women writers has contributed to a one-sided view of the period. As Debora Shuger puts it, ‘more familiar modern issues and terms of analysis [have] quietly or not so quietly displace[d] historical ones’ (4). If we are sincere in our desire for a fuller understanding of early modern women writers, both English and American, we need to pay as much attention to the orthodox as we do to their subversive sisters.”

Similarly, in her 2010 article "A Knowing People, Early modern motherhood, female authorship, and working-class community in Dorothy Burch’s A Catechism of the Several Heads of the Christian Religion (1646)" McQuade writes,

“Recent scholarly accounts of early modern motherhood by Janet Adelman and Frances Dolan ...have focused upon play and pamphlet representations of murderous mothers. These approaches have taught us a great deal. But by focusing upon subversive maternity, they tell only part of the story. Burch’s catechism, along with other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maternal catechisms, offers an alternative account of early modern motherhood, one which emphasizes a mother’s love for her child, her intellectual sophistication, and her active engagement in her child’s education. This image usefully complements the current emphasis upon subversive maternity in early modern England; when considered together, these approaches suggest the complexity and range of early modern understandings of motherhood.”

Interestingly, the literary historians who hunt for the subversive writers and who find nothing interesting in the writers who were generally content with the status quo seem to me driven as much by a desire to affiliate.