The Oral Fixation: The Oral/Textual Binary from Phaedrus to Freshman Composition

Abstract

Though Plato may have been making a metaphysical argument when he valorized orality over textuality in Phaedrus, a close reading of “Plato's Pharmacy” reveals that Jacques Derrida's response, which reversed Plato's oral/textual dissociation, was metaphorical. The difference/differénce between the metaphysical and metaphorical is itself lost in the Yale School's translation of French deconstruction into American poststructuralism. When the Yale School's metaphysical interpretation of poststructuralism, and particularly the literary notion of the author, is imported into composition, Derrida's claim that writing is “essentially democratic” is itself reversed, and the student subject is deconstructed alongside student writing.

Notes

¹I thank RR peer reviewer Sharon Crowley for her generous comments on my timorous revoicing of her revoicing of Foucault. I'd also like to thank Judy Davidson and the members of the WAC Faculty Writing Group at UTPA for their ongoing support as I worked my way through the many drafts of this essay.

²While the translation of Phaedrus used in this essay is H. N. Fowler's, B. Jowett's translation from The Works of Plato provides the term reminiscence. This term, I think, more completely captures Plato's conceptual difference between memory and its imitation/appearance.

³George A. Kennedy gives an historical example of oral memory's propensity to create an elite, educated class: “A retentive memory of the wording of extensive oral texts is characteristic of high-status individuals in traditional cultures, the Brahmins of India, for example” (99).