From an interview with Victor J. Vitanza in the Spring 1993 issue of Composition Studies: Freshman English News, a journal of "rhetorical theory" published at Texas Christian University. A note accompanying the interview states that Vitanza, who teaches rhetoric and composition at the University of Texas at Arlington, has lectured on topics that include "narrative theory, tropology, deconstruction, historiography of rhetoric, the discourses of hysteria and schizophrenia, Greco-Roman history of rhetoric, revaluation of evaluation, problem of the ethical subject, [and] Marxist-critical pedagogy." The interview was conducted by Cynthia Haynes-Burton, the director of the University of Texas's Writer's Center:

Cynthia Haynes-Burton:

Who do you think your audience is?

Victor Vitanza:

My attitudes are that I am very much a "comp teacher," that I am a writing instructor, and that I am contemplative about what I do. I always am giving writing lessons and taking writing lessons. I don't know, however, if I am Levi-Strauss or if I am that South American Indian chief in "Tristes Tropiques" that Levi-Strauss indirectly gives writing lessons to. Perhaps I am both. Which can be confusing.

One of the fundamental questions that I am ever-reflexively confronted with is that I do not know who I am for this profession. I am a member of this field called composition studies, or rhetoric or composition, or whatever, while at the same time I am not a member by virtue of the fact that I do not follow what is considered to be the protocol for this field. In other words, I do not know what other people in the field do do. Therefore, many people do not sense me as being one of them. It is what we do together evidently that determines whether or not we can swim, crawl, run, jump, or fly together. Aristotle spoke at great length about knowing, doing, and making. In this sense, then, let me be a para-Aristotelian.

Haynes-Burton:

Please start over.

Vitanza:

Okay, so what I have said so far: I very consciously do not follow the field's research protocols. And yet, of course, I do; most other times, however, I do not. And yet again! Do you feel the vertigo of this? I hope that my saying all this, however, does not come across as if I am dis-engaging into some form of "individualism," or "expressionism," for I do not believe in such a fatuous, dangerous concept as practiced in our field.

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