Bizzell, "Marxist Ideas in Composition Studies"
Bizzell asserts that compositionists tend to gloss over the Marxist ideas in the work of Friere, Bakhtin, and Vygotsky, following a long American tradition of not engaging power structures and social class. She urges us to reconsider Marxism and what it can bring to our ideas of composition. For example, she shows how we can see individual students’ acts of opposition as part of a larger pattern of resistance and engage them as productive disruptions. She also points out that Marxism can help us struggle with contradiction, which is productive, rather than trying to resolve it, which is pointless. On this point, she quotes Friere and Macedo: “The role of critical pedagogy is not to extinguish tensions. The prime role of critical pedagogy is to lead students to recognize various tensions and enable them to deal effectively with them” (65). She explains further that
Marxist analysis can help us take this more complicated and generative view of contradictions; it can teach us to understand their origins in ideology and to imagine alternatives that break the rules of the current social game. Thus, we gain richer possibilities for studying the cultural elements in language-using processes, and we enlarge our theoretical perspective from the social units of classroom and business office to the political structures of class and capitalism. I believe that Marxist ideas are also valuable because they can challenge individualism, challenge our American tendency to see ourselves as autonomous intellectuals like the Walden resident, Ahab, or Huckleberry Finn. (66)
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