From the issue dated March 21, 2003
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Deconstructing CompositionThe 'new theory wars' break out in an unlikely disciplineBy SCOTT MCLEMEE The writing center at George Washington University belies the stereotypes about
They may ask a student to read a paper out loud, to help him recognize vague or clumsy passages. It's a technique belonging to what people in the field of composition call "lore" -- a body of methods and rules of thumb passed down by generations of writing instructors. But when discussing the ideas they studied in a graduate course on composition and rhetoric, their references prove a lot more cutting edge. The two students were particularly excited by the ideas in Race, Rhetoric and the Postcolonial (State University of New York Press), containing discussions with thinkers such as Homi Bhabha, Ernesto Laclau, and Stuart Hall. One of the editors of the volume, Gary A. Olson, a professor of English at the University of South Florida, recently declared that the field of composition studies is on the verge of "what undoubtedly will come to be known as 'the new theory wars.'" In an influential study called Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy (University of Pittsburgh Press), the late Robert J. Connors, a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, describes a field defined by seething hostilities: "Social constructionists criticize cognitivists. Marxists deride expressivists. ... Philosophers feel ignored by empiricists, experimenters resent the criticisms of rhetoricians, and teachers feel despised by everybody." People outside the field are often surprised to learn of its internal conflicts -- or even that there is something called "composition studies" in the first place. What possible intellectual stakes could there be to teaching freshmen to write a coherent paragraph? (It sounds like having a theoretical debate about how to drive: a distraction at best; at worst, an accident waiting to happen.) If there is one point on which nearly everyone in composition studies can agree, however, it's that the field covers a lot more than problems correctable with red ink. Recent comp-studies scholarship includes research on collaborative writing done in contemporary workplaces, and the effect of information technology on the composition process. And the assumption that literacy is a basic tool of citizenship becomes a problem, not a platitude, when students learning to write come from diverse backgrounds. Much of the tension in composition studies involves what counts as knowledge within the discipline. Some argue that the field requires theoretical work concerning "discourse," a term covering all forms of communication (and one that compositionists made their own well before it entered the broader lexicon of the humanities). Other scholars insist that work in composition studies ought to have some application to what goes on in the classroom, that discussions within the profession should focus on the tools of writing instruction. Theoretically minded scholars reply that such pragmatism reduces composition to the status of a service, rather than a full-fledged discipline within the humanities. History Lesson The growth of composition as a field of scholarship is fairly recent. Freshman classes on writing were first offered by American universities in the 1880s, with a clear expectation that they would be phased out once high schools started turning out adequately prepared students. (So much for 19th-century optimism.) The Sisyphean labor of teaching "comp" as opposed to "lit" became one of the least-loved duties of English professors -- a subject mainly for complaint, not cogitation. But when the post-Sputnik infusions of federal cash into higher education reached English departments in the early 1960s, composition faculties were the primary beneficiaries. (During one appropriation hearing, a member of Congress was reassured that no money would go "to teach novels and poems.") What had been a form of drudgery rapidly transformed into a field of expertise. Compositionists began drawing on scholarship from other disciplines. Research in linguistics and developmental psychology shaped the emergence of "cognitivist" composition scholarship -- an emphasis sharply distinguished from the work of "expressivists," who debated techniques such as "free writing" (in which students composed in uninterrupted bursts, to overcome the performance anxiety of setting words on the page). Sociological and anthropological citations began showing up in composition journals, as open-admissions policies compelled writing instructors to grapple with differences in culture and class. And compositionists revived the study of rhetoric, finding in the writings of Aristotle and Cicero the original body of sophisticated communications theory. Most composition scholars had done their graduate work in literature. But in the 1970s, a few English departments began offering graduate concentrations in "rhet comp." Given the need to staff university writing centers and run composition programs, the demand for Ph.D.'s in the field was high (by contrast with that for, say, Milton scholars). And so a whole cohort of scholars emerged for whom composition studies had defined their entire intellectual and professional identity. Discourse Aplenty The arguments between cognitivists and expressivists in the 1970s are distant echoes. Indeed, composition studies now has its own intellectual historians, who study the debates that have shaped the field. Someday, the past decade may look like the era when composition underwent its deepest crisis of self-definition -- recasting itself as part of cultural studies rather than a discipline devoted to teaching skills. One of the most prolific figures involved in that change is Mr. Olson, of South Florida, who is the author or editor of numerous books in composition studies, including, most recently, Justifying Belief: Stanley Fish and the Work of Rhetoric (State University of New York Press). "In my work," Mr. Olson says, "I've been trying to expand the borders of composition and rhetoric, so that we can see that it's really, in a larger sense, a discipline about how language works. Sometimes that means you're going to be looking at things that, for the moment, at least, don't have anything to do with the teaching of writing." He has worked to redraw the boundaries of composition by conducting interviews with, and symposiums on, thinkers such as Noam Chomsky, Richard Rorty, Gayatri Spivak, and Slavoj Zizek -- figures who have not taught a comp class in quite some while, if ever. Many of those exchanges have appeared in JAC, formerly known as the Journal of Advanced Composition, which Mr. Olson once edited. The wholesale importing of theoretical work from other disciplines has generated audible discontent among some in the field. "It may very well be composition's dirty little secret that many of us who teach writing would rather talk about cultural studies or critical theory and not trouble ourselves with the writing that our students do," Howard Tinberg writes in the journal Teaching English in the Two-Year College. When Mr. Tinberg, director of the writing lab at Bristol Community College, in Fall River, Mass., says "us," it is clear that he really means "them." He quotes another community-college faculty member's remark that some people in English "think that preparing students for the work world is beneath them." But the vocabulary of high theory has also begun to shape how some composition scholars discuss writing instruction itself. A glance at a journal such as College Composition and Communication or at monographs from the National Council of Teachers of English will turn up articles describing campus writing centers as "sites of knowledge-making" or offering "Althusserian readings of the subjectivity of tutor talk." One Step Forward ... ? By enriching the set of ideas that composition scholars bring to their work, Mr. Olson thinks the discipline can do "much more than teaching students to 'express themselves.'" It will help them "learn to engage in ideological critique," he says, "to effect real changes in their lives." In recent years, however, he adds, composition has seen "a revitalized backlash against theoretical scholarship." A rhetorician might note that Mr. Olson's language implies a certain narrative about composition studies -- treating it as a discipline that has advanced, marching forward under the stimulus of bold new ideas. Elizabeth H. Boquet, a professor of English at Fairfield University, tells a different tale. She sees recent developments as a return to something that compositionists once struggled to escape: the old hierarchy of expertise within the English department. "The split used to be between the people in literature and the people doing comp," she says. "Now that comp is a fairly hot discipline, with people able to get tenure-track positions, there are people in composition studies who have really good positions. And below them is a whole realm of people whose material conditions in the academic work force have not improved at all." Surveys show that nearly all institutions of higher learning offer courses in composition instruction -- with at least some of that teaching, and often most of it, done by nontenured instructors at 85 percent of the institutions. Besides the classroom itself, instruction also occurs in writing centers, often staffed by undergraduates and adjuncts. Such labor-intensive pedagogy does not leave a lot of energy for scholarship among those who do it. "But our practice involves more theory than we sometimes realize," says Ms. Boquet. In her recent book, Noise From the Writing Center (Utah State University Press), she challenges the way the idea of "community" has taken shape among those in the trenches of writing instruction. Sometimes it refers to the place the students come from; sometimes, running a writing center is described as building a community. But the term itself is one that needs to be questioned, she says. "What people in composition shared until the early 1980s was a sense of the teaching position. Now we're seeing fissures. You have to ask, What do we share? If we don't share a common concern for [pedagogical] practice in our scholarship, if we don't share some similarity in working conditions, where is the community?" Team Concepts As if the standoff between tenure-track theorists and adjunct-level pedagogues were not difficult enough, the situation within composition studies has grown even more complex with the emergence of a new area of specialization: the field of writing-program administration. "A conversation has been going for a little while now about whether or not administrative work has a conceptual basis, about whether it counts as intellectual work," says David Blakesley, director of professional writing and an associate professor of English at Purdue University's main campus. "People who are hired out of comp-rhet programs sometimes begin managing a writing center right away," says Ms. Boquet. "It's very different from what happens to someone from lit, who might spend a few years developing their courses and then be asked to step up to chair something." Mr. Blakesley notes that a number of graduate programs -- including those at Purdue, Syracuse University, and the University of Arizona -- have responded to the demand for training in the administrative side of composition work. That may sound like the most brass-tack sort of development. The potential for conflict becomes clear, however, when the director of George Washington's writing center, Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber, offers copies of her recent scholarly publications -- articles with titles like "Workplace Teams and Writing Groups: Team Management Theory and the Collaborative Writing Process." Scholarship in the humanities has always kept its distance from the business school. But in some recent work in composition studies, ideas about discourse mingle with concepts from the corporate world. "Simply to collapse the work of administration into the work of theory does everybody a disservice," says Lynn Worsham, a professor of English at South Florida and editor of JAC, who, along with Mr. Olson, is one of the scholars most active in narrowing the gap between composition and cultural studies. She is troubled by the fact that composition studies is now making "a fairly huge investment in the subject of writing-program administration." "Because I'm in rhetoric and composition, people have regularly assumed that I'm a candidate for writing-program administrator," she says. "Well, I know nothing about it. And I have no interest in knowing anything about it. For the past 30 years, people in the field have tried to define [composition studies] as an intellectual discipline, not a service component of the university. But now it seems like people are embracing it as a service component." The effect has been to create "a very chilly climate" for those involved in theory -- at least, theory of the sort that she and Mr. Olson find interesting. A Rhetorical Question "We've developed a sort of U-shaped discipline," says David Fleming, an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "There's a great deal of activity at the freshman level. That's the upper part of the U on one side. On the other side, there's the flourishing of graduate programs, research journals, monographs, and so on. And there's not a whole lot in between." But suppose Mr. Fleming had the power to convert that U into -- well, Utopia: a field with all the strengths of composition studies, and none of its current weaknesses. What would it look like? "At its heart," he says, "this is an educational discipline, but I don't want that discipline reduced to a single 15-week course that serves as a transitional period between high school and college." An undergraduate major might be a step in the right direction, he suggests. It would "involve the integration of projects that are currently fragmented" across many departments, subsuming the studies of "speaking, thinking, writing, logic, and the interpretation of cultural texts." Interdisciplinary vigor would not be purchased at the expense of the writing center, though. "I don't think there's anyplace else where students get that kind of one-on-one intellectual interaction," says Mr. Fleming. Such a well-rounded discipline would also have to be well financed (which is why this scenario unfolds in Utopia). "A lot of this has to do with the status of general education at the start of the 21st century," Mr. Fleming says. "To get it back on track, I have to think that rhetoric and composition programs are going to be central." http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 49, Issue 28, Page A16
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education