Reader Response ~ - - Rene Girard and the Dynamics of Imitation , Scapegoating

Richard Boyd's "Reading Student Resistance" and his earlier JAC article "Imitate Me; Don't Imitate Me" have convinced me that Rene Girard's theory of mimetic desire may have much to teach us about the dynamics of composition. Both articles offer an impressive analysis of imitation as a moment of coercion and "double bind" for students and teacher. In my view, Boyd's most significant insight concerns the reciprocal nature of resistance in teacher-student interaction. Students resist teachers' attempts to set learning agendas for them, while teachers resist these same students because of the implied alternative agendas in students' resistance. We teachers are every bit as involved in such resistance as our students. I confess-with a bit of embarrassment-that I saw myself in Boyd's description of his own defensive response to a teaching assistant who wrote to him asking, "Why don't you do your job and show us how we're supposed to teach writing?" Like Boyd, I've had teaching assistants write such things to me. I too have often responded with two-page tomes to a TA's few lines of resistance. Like him, I realize that these long responses are ''ultimately intended as persuasive and not dialogic" and that in writing them I am resisting their perspective as strongly as they are resisting mine. Boyd's use of Girard's theory of mimetic desire helps me to see part of this reciprocal resistance more clearly. As teachers, we do place TA's in a "double bind" of "imitate me; don't imitate me," asking them to imitate us by considering the big questions about how writing instruction