Fear of Narrative: Revisiting the Bartholomae-Elbow Debate through the Figure of the Writing Teacher in Contemporary American Fiction

It is my contention that David Bartholomae and Peter Elbow's well-known discussion in the late 1980s and early 1990s-sometimes referred to as their "debate"-is still a text of central importance in the field of composition studies, one that speaks to timeless questions of narrative and pedagogy in the writing classroom. Indeed, rich representations of writing teachers in contemporary fiction remind us that Bartholomae and Elbow were articulating a crucial theoretical divide, not just in comp theory but in American higher education.