Microhistories of Composition - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607324040 ISBN 13: 9781607324041

Verlag: Utah State University Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Writing studies has been dominated throughout its history by grand narratives of the discipline, but in this volume Bruce McComiskey begins to explore microhistory as a way to understand, enrich, and complicate how the field relates to its past. Microhistory investigates the dialectical interaction of social history and cultural history, enabling historians to examine uncommon sites, objects, and agents of historical significance overlooked by social history and restricted to local effects by cultural history. This approach to historical scholarship is ideally suited for exploring the complexities of a discipline like composition.

Through an introduction and eleven chapters, McComiskey and his contributors—including major figures in the historical research of writing studies, such as Louise Wetherbee Phelps, Kelly Ritter, and Neal Lerner—develop focused narratives of particular significant moments or themes in disciplinary history. They introduce microhistorical methodologies and illustrate their application and value for composition historians, contributing to the complexity and adding momentum to the emerging trend within writing studies toward a richer reading of the field’s past and future. Scholars and historians of both composition and rhetoric will appreciate the fresh perspectives on institutional and disciplinary histories and larger issues of rhetorical agency and engagement enacted in writing classrooms that are found in Microhistories of Composition.

Other contributors include Cheryl E. Ball, Suzanne Bordelon, Jacob Craig, Matt Davis, Douglas Eyman, Brian Gogan, David Gold, Christine Martorana, Bruce McComiskey, Josh Mehler, Annie S. Mendenhall, Kendra Mitchell, Antony N. Ricks, David Stock, Kathleen Blake Yancey, Bret Zawilski, and James T. Zebroski.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bruce McComiskey specializes in rhetoric and composition, classical rhetoric, and professional writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His publications include Microhistories of Composition, Dialectical Rhetoric, Teaching Composition as a Social Process, Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric, and the edited collection English Studies: An Introduction to the Disciplines.

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Microhistories of Composition

By Bruce Mccomiskey

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2016 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-404-1

Contents

Introduction Bruce McComiskey, 
1 "At a Hinge of History" in 1963: Rereading Disciplinary Origins in Composition Annie S. Mendenhall, 
2 The 1979 Ottawa Conference and Its Inscriptions: Recovering a Canadian Moment in American Rhetoric and Composition Louise Wetherbee Phelps, 
3 Journal Editors in the Archives: Reportage as Microhistory Kelly Ritter, 
4 History of a Broken Thing: The Multijournal Special Issue on Electronic Publication Douglas Eyman and Cheryl E. Ball, 
5 Tracing Clues: "Bodily Pedagogies," the "Action of the Mind," and Women's Rhetorical Education at the School of Expression Suzanne Bordelon, 
6 Teaching Grammar to Improve Student Writing? Revisiting the Bateman-Zidonis Studies Revisiting the Bateman-Zidonis Studies James T. Zebroski, 
7 Who Was Warren Taylor? A Microhistorical Footnote to James A. Berlin's Rhetoric and Reality David Stock, 
8 Remembering Roger Garrison: Composition Studies and the Star-Making Machine Neal Lerner, 
9 Elizabeth Ervin and the Challenge of Civic Engagement: A Composition and Rhetoric Teacher's Struggle to Make Writing Matter David Gold, 
10 Going Public with Ken Macrorie Brian Gogan, 
11 Against the Rhetoric and Composition Grain: A Microhistorical View Jacob Craig, Matthew Davis, Christine Martorana, Josh Mehler, Kendra Mitchell, Antony N. Ricks, Bret Zawilski, and Kathleen Blake Yancey, 
About the Authors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

"At a Hinge of History" in 1963

Rereading Disciplinary Origins in Composition

ANNIE S. MENDENHALL

Universities in America are at a hinge of history: while connected with their past, they are swinging in another direction.

— Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University

In 1963, University of California president Clark Kerr delivered a series of lectures at Harvard on the state of the American university, published as The Uses of the University. In that now famous work, Kerr argued that American universities had become integral to national welfare and economic success––"a prime instrument of national purpose" (Kerr 2001, 66). Kerr employs a synecdoche––the hinge––to describe this shift as a doorway to a new era, evoking grand acts of entrance and transition. In doing so, he mirrors the way composition historians have talked about disciplinary origins. Take, for example, Stephen M. North, who, in The Making of Knowledge in Composition, pinpoints "the birth of modern Composition, capital C, to 1963. And what marks its emergence as a nascent academic field more than anything else is this need to replace practice as the field's dominant mode of inquiry" (North 1987, 15). Emergence and replacement function like Kerr's hinge, separating (but not severing) modern composition from its lore-based past. The parallels in Kerr's and North's arguments invite us to revisit the structure of historical narratives of composition and to reread how we use markers, moments, and objects to define historical transitions.

North and other early composition historians share another commonality with Kerr: the belief that the 1960s was a transformative decade. According to many historical narratives of the field, the increasing visibility of composition research in the 1960s––and in 1963 in particular––forged new legitimacy for composition. Robert J. Connors argues that during the years between 1960 and 1965, "the efforts of ... new theorists changed the face of the field forever" (Connors 1997, 205), creating the modern discipline of composition studies. Connors singles out the 1963 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) as "qualitatively changed from earlier conferences" (206). The year 1963 is also cited anecdotally by scholars, including, for example, David Smit, who calls it "the year the profession came of age" (Smit 2004, 2), and Louise Wetherbee Phelps (2010, 124) in her "Composition Studies" entry in the Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition. For many historians, key publications in 1963 catalyzed this disciplinary emergence––specifically Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer's Research in Written Composition (RWC) and Albert R. Kitzhaber's Themes, Theories, and Therapy: The Teaching of Writing in College (TTT). For example, James A. Berlin's (1987, 135) Rhetoric and Reality calls RWC a sign that composition was "confident of its value and its future [as a] discipline." North refers to RWC as "the charter of modern Composition" (North 1987, 17) and calls TTT "the first book-length study of college writing" (North 1987, 14). Both RWC and TTT, self-described "reports," called for scholarly attention to writing, and historians have considered them formative texts that authorized research in the field.

Reflecting on the impact of RWC, Lloyd-Jones has noted that historians viewed its publication as "a watershed for separating the old order in composition studies from the new," although the authors "considered [them]selves as doing routine status summaries of conventional empirical research as a basis for identifying sound practice" (Lloyd-Jones 2006, 18). The disconnect between the motives of researchers like Lloyd-Jones and the interpretation of historians invites a reexamination of 1963 in light of new historiographies that disrupt the idea of fixed disciplinary origins. Microhistory serves as a useful analytical stance for this project because it changes the scale of analysis from entire decades or centuries to moments and individuals. More important, microhistory attempts to account for the complexity of historical contexts by maintaining "sensitivity to the language of and the categorization made by the actors themselves" (Alapuro 2012, 141). As Simona Cerutti explains, microhistory strives to avoid "the anachronisms arising from 'received historical common sense'" and instead seeks "to construct 'relevant' contexts of analysis rather than sticking to preconceived ideas of what was relevant" (Cerutti 2004, 21). In this collection, chapters by David Stock and Brian Gogan employ a similar approach to reconstructing individual figures' contexts erased by Berlin's historical taxonomy. Here I am interested in how contexts can be erased or flattened when historians construct timelines, which, as Louise Wetherbee Phelps's study of the 1979 Ottawa Conference demonstrates, involves a seemingly arbitrary but politically, institutionally, and individually significant process of selecting (and simultaneously ignoring) a particular year as a watershed. As the quotes by Kerr and Lloyd-Jones suggest, contemporaries of 1963 saw that year as both a transformative era and a period of routine academic work. These individuals' assessments invite us to look back for a different history of 1963––a history not motivated by the desire to find an origin point but by a curiosity about what was seen as both significant and mundane about composition work at that time.

In this essay, I revisit composition's disciplinary origin narratives through an analysis of TTT and RWC––texts frequently cited but rarely analyzed in detail. What makes these texts compelling for a microhistorical analysis is the way...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Utah State University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1607324040
• ISBN 13: 9781607324041
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 327
• Herausgeber: McComiskey Bruce
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar