In the 1996 book "Generation X Goes to College: An Eye-Opening Account of Teaching in Post-Modern America," Peter Sacks probes the "decay" of higher education in the United States; a decay he attributes to listless, entitled students. This paper interrogates the paradigm of Boomers and Generation Xers poised in opposition to one another, classifying Boomers as teachers and Gen Xers as students--while simultaneously dismissing the very paradigm the author/educators want to understand and perpetuate--multiculturalism. The paper proposes to use generational identity in the classroom to resemble what Mary Louise Pratt has called a "contact zone." Its larger exploration of this contact zone is three-fold: first, to illuminate the current scholarly conversations that validate Generation X as a rhetorical marker and contribute to that conversation; second, to investigate ways to break down the authority-granting hierarchy that gives power to older generations while taking it away from younger ones within the academy generally and within the writing classroom specifically; and third, to generate pedagogical strategies that begin to enact the breakdown of age-based hierarchies. The paper focuses on one text that both responds to generationally-based hierarchies of authority and examines the relationships between Boomers and Xers rhetorical authority: Douglas Coupland's novel "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture." It also discusses ways in which this text could be used as a model for students' and teachers' thinking and writing about the construction of generational identity, relationships between generations, and personal rhetorical authority. (NKA)