The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing

In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams writes of how, after a boyhood in a Welsh village, he came to the city, to Cambridge, only then to hear townsmen, academics, an influential version of what country life, country literature, really meant: a prepared and persuasive cultural history (6). This odd double movement, this irony, in which one only begins to understand the place one has come from through the act of leaving it, proved to be one of the shaping forces of Williams's career-so that, some 35 years after having first gone down to Cambridge, he was still to ask himself: Where do I stand . . . in another country or in this valuing city? (6) A similar irony, I think, describes my own relations to the university. I was raised in a working-class home in Philadelphia, but it was only when I went away to college that I heard the term working class used or began to think of myself as part of it. Of course by then I no longer was quite part of it, or at least no longer wholly or simply part of it, but I had also been at college long enough to realize that my relations to it were similarly ambiguous-that here too was a community whose values and interests I could in part share but to some degree would always feel separate from. This sense of difference, of overlap, of tense plurality, of being at once part of several communities and yet never wholly a member of one, has accompanied nearly all the work and study I have done at the university. So when, in the past few years, a number of teachers and theorists of writing began to talk about the idea of community as somehow central to our work, I was drawn to what was said. Since my aim here is to argue for a more critical look at a