The issue of bedevils contemporary composition theorists and practitio ners. As Lester Faigley, Patricia Bizzell, James Berlin, and other postmodernists have critiqued foundational theories of writing, a dangerous dichotomy between thought and language developed. If thought does not precede its expression as foundationalists contend, then does language determine thought? The postmodern emphasis on language's influence upon thought led to a profound doubt whether individual any control over influential medium of language at all. Rebecca Howard, in a recent College English review essay, demonstrates either/or thinking created by postmodern critique: It become commonplace for rhetoricians to engage in question of agency. . . . Can writers control their writing processes or are their writing processes?and indeed writers themselves?constructed by their cultural settings? (349). In Fragments of Rationality, Faigley reluctantly assumes latter?writers are constructed by their culture, yet he confronts disturbing implications of postmodern anti-foundationalism. When a subject is situated among many competing discourses that precede [it], Faigley cautions, the notion of 'participation' becomes problematic in its implication that subject can control its location and moves within a discourse (226-27). The autonomous writer of foundationalism becomes a situated object, something subjected to influences of dominant discourses. These influences reduce subject to an effect rather than a cause of discourse so subjectivity becomes a debilitating pun, and agency, illusion (9). Faigley, therefore, refers to postmodern problem of as impasse, for it leads to a theoretical dead end (20).1 Postmodernism, Faigley admits, has not produced ... a broad theory of agency that permits alternative affirmations as well as deconstructive critiques (39). Postmodern composition theorists, for example, have not been able to
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