Left Margins offers an inside view of the cultural politics of knowledge in college-level composition classrooms. The basic question this book raises is whether or not we can continue to represent the writing process apolitically as the work of autonomous individuals recording their experiences or realizing their private objectives. Readers will get a front-row, classroom perspective on the confrontation between politically engaged writing teachers and largely resistant students, between critical pedagogy and the orthodoxies of American culture at the end of the twentieth century. The book presents classroom strategies that develop students' awareness of their own ideological subjectivities.