This article argues for repositioning voice within BIPOC histories and contributions to the fields of English/rhetoric/composition studies. By reinvestigating the affordances and constraints of Expressivist-driven definitions of “voice” and the contemporary applications of imitation writing assignments, this article demonstrates alternative approaches to teaching and thinking through voice in writingbased courses.

Expressivism lost status and respect in composition and rhetoric during the 1990s, despite attempts by some to defend its insights. Few in the field call themselves expressivists today, and yet we can recognize traces of this movement in work by contemporary scholars and theorists. Indeed, the field itself still retains commitments that echo that early approach to writing and writers.

This article analyzes the rhetoric of public attitudes toward composition, as represented in Stanley Fish’s “Think Again” blog in the New York Times and in comments posted by his readers. Fish denounces the field of composition as highly politicized and anti-academic and advocates instead a belletristic, current-traditional approach. The dialogue between Fish and his audience exemplifies the web of definitions and logical fallacies by which current-traditionalism and belletristic English frame public attitudes. To the extent that composition’s “public turn” involves engaging public opinion, compositionists must anticipate this framing or else find their engagements ineffective, even self-defeating.

Through an examination of archival texts produced at sites of suppressed local rhetorics, this essay situates Oklahoma as a location of writing at the intersection of ecocomposition theory, critical regionalism, and composition pedagogy to establish the need for using local texts and transrhetorical analysis in writing classrooms.

Because the ideological and methodological aims of post-process theory could distort the progressive agenda that has been connected to composition since the early twentieth century, we must look at this theory through the historical lens that Weaver and Hairston provide in order to maintain the progressive potential of post-process theory.

Though diversity serves as a valuable source for rhetorical inquiry, expressivist instructors who privilege diversity writing may also overemphasize the essential authenticity of their students’ vernaculars. This romantic and salvationist impulse reveals the troubling implications of eighteenth-century Natural Language Theory and may, consequently, lead to exoticizing and stereotyping students’ linguistic performances.

Although the Bartholomae/Elbow debate is often framed as a modern conflict between the advocates of “academic” and “personal” writing, it is more appropriately viewed as the most recent manifestation of the historical clash between expressivism and constructivism. However, both sides of this conflict, which split over whether to see writing as a product of the mind or of an external discourse, rest upon a dualist assumption that the primary task of language is to provide linguistic representations of a transcendental ego. This essay first draws from the work of Richard Rorty and John Dewey in order to critique the dualist legacy of the expressivist/constructivist debate and then explicates Dewey’s views on mind, language, and experience in order to reconstruct a pragmatic philosophy of communication and a progressive composition pedagogy.

This essay examines the pedagogical practices of the poet, civil rights activist, andteacher Melvin B. Tolson who taught at Wiley College from 1923 to 1947. Tolson’s complex classroom style, which mixed elements of classical, African American, and current-traditional rhetoric, produced a pedagogy that was at once conservative, progressive, and radical, inspiring his students to academic achievement and social action. Tolson demonstrates that it is possible to instruct students in the norms of the academy without sacrificing their home voices or identities.

This article represents stories of eight former composition students, Appalachian working class women, who move from silence in the academy to voice in their communities to a more self–confident identity without destroying the community from which they came. The author argues that compositionists need to consider the two–edged nature of literacy; how literacy serves first generation, nontraditional learners; the intergenerational effects of literacy; the importance of expressivist writing as a transition into academic literacy; and the importance of region and class in multicultural conversations.

This study examines composition at public Midwestern normal schools, the teacher training institutions of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It argues that the unique social environment, educational aims, and intellectual traditions of the normal school gave rise to attitudes about composition theory, methods, teachers, and students that are much more compatible with composition’s contemporary ethic than those associated with the elite Eastern colleges where the origins of composition have most often been studied.

Silence has positive as well as negative attributes, and composition teachers can help students understand and use its aesthetic, ethical, and political resources in their personal writing. Approaching silence in these ways can establish new alignments among the expressivist, psychoanalytical, and social discourses that circulate around the term personal writing.

A s a field of professional inquiry intertwined with the practice and teaching of its own subject, composition studies has enjoyed the steady pace of its own recent evolution.Few composition scholars twenty years ago would have imagined the rate at which the field is now developing, exploding beyond its boundaries, creating new alliances, and locating new sites for inquiry and knowledge production.These current transformations owe in part to the inevitable burgeoning of a theoretically interdisciplinary field with a strong orientation toward self-reflection.They also owe to unprecedented changes underway in higher education, changes pressured by shifts in the politics and economics of university administration, the advent of new technologies, population changes that affect student demographics, and the creation of alternative structures and contexts for teaching and learning.Composition, in seeking a disciplinary identity, is questioning the ways it creates and mediates knowledge and the ways in which that knowledge informs and is informed by various contexts for research and practice.This collection focuses on the ways in which composition reconsiders established dichotomies, examines new connections among areas of inquiry, and suggests avenues for inquiry that have transformative consequences for the sites of theory, research, and teaching.When we first proposed this volume of essays, we sought submissions that reconsidered the relationship among theory, research and practice, expecting that our focus would primarily be on the changing face of composition research.Our open call and invitation to individual scholars, however, resulted in very few reports of research studies, but rather in contributions that reflect the extent to which the theory/research/practice relationship now occupies our disciplinary thinking.Since the publication of Stephen North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (1987), the past decade has seen attention to research methodology largely displaced by conflict between theory and practice.This conflict, still rooted, one might argue, in the desire for a unified theory, often centers on the extent to which any theory employed by compositionists must grow, if not from research, then from practice, or at least edgment of "what is contradictory, and perhaps unknowable" (9).Many of the authors in this volume (Rose and Lauer; Chiang; Grimm, et al.; Okawa) build into their essays acknowledgement of their positions as scholars and researchers and examine their "findings" as cultural and ideological products.At that same time, some of them are quick to point out the limits and consequences of new theories and methodologies for composition as a disciplinary community (Seitz; MacDonald; Neff; Ray and Barton).Increasingly, compositionists have more confidence in the recognition that teaching makes knowledge, and that practice, overdetermined as it is, continually calls into question the traditional purpose of theory-to explain unaccounted-for phenomena and solve new problems.Lore, as North distinguishes it from traditional disciplinary knowledge production, can, Harkin argues, be thought of as postdisciplinary theory, because it allows for practitioners' often contradictory attempts to solve writing problems with more than one cause, rather than using theory in the traditional way to contain situations (134).Beth Daniell has argued that while composition theories may lack the authority to dictate pedagogy, as rhetoric, they are what persuade us to teach writing in the ways that we do (130).At the same time that theories may contain the discipline by "serving the interests of . . .groups within that discipline" (131), they are what enable us, she says, to "create a community in which we can figure out what we, individually and collectively, believe about our work" (135).In that rhetorical and political sense, theory is practice.But, as several of the authors in this volume (Ferry; Vandenberg; Howard) ask, whose "work" and whose interests define us and remain at the center of composition as a discipline?Can theory, research, and practice in ever new relationships intersect and hold an expanding community together or drive it apart into separate communities whose power and authority may be in jeopardy?Composition's calling into question its knowledge comes at a time when the authority of that expert knowledge may be at risk.In the wake of shrinking graduate programs and the responsibility-centered-management of academic departments in the new corporate universities, the literature components of some English departments are beginning to reclaim an expertise in the teaching of writing or, in some instances, to efface that expertise, deeming it no longer necessary, politically appropriate, or cost-effective.Much composition scholarship in fact contributes to this withering away of the more public conception of composition.Our growing understanding of complex context-specific literacy practices runs counter to institutional conditions that assume composition is an essential set of transparent skills to be conveyed one-time-only to first year students by exploited instructors.If retooled writing courses do result from the disciplinary boundary crossing of compositionists into deconstruction, feminist, multicultural, and cultural studies, what in the experiences of teachers and students justifies or interrogates these theories in practice?How does interdisciplinary inquiry expand avenues and change how and what we research and teach?What locates theorists, courses, teachers, and programs that might grow from this research within "composition"?Several of the authors in this volume locate their concerns about composition's "identity crisis" in a disjuncture between theory and pedagogy, whether questioning composition's attempts to achieve more disciplinary status (Ferry; Vandenberg; Howard) or its failure to focus more attention on knowledgebuilding inside the field (MacDonald; Neff).

[W]hen something becomes as “common sensical” as the idea that students should own their own writing has, we need to take a step back from examining how ownership is removed or restored and look at the idea itself since there is a possibility that it reflects those dominant beliefs and values, but not other (non-dominant) ones. This essay begins to do that by exploring how ownership was represented in two critical “moments” in the history of composition scholarship and pedagogy that continue to wield considerable influence, the progressivism of the early 1900s and expressivism of the 1960s and 1970s. (Adler-Kassner 208-9).

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Effective citizens do more than interpret the world around them - they change it. In Between the Lines, John Schilb shows the role composition could play in enabling students to intervene in civic affairs by suggesting ways they can create their own discourses. When instructors understand and put into practice the latest in theory, they can help students learn how to read and write the lines to initiate change. In addition to looking at the line between the academy and the world at large, Schilb examines traditional barriers within English Departments. He argues that many of them have used theory to reinforce a separation of composition studies and literary studies in both theory and instruction. The book offers a thorough, accessible review of recent developments in both composition and literary theory as well as a fruitful comparison of their respective uses and understandings. The chapters in Part One discuss how composition studies and literary studies have differed in their interpretations of the term rhetoric. Part Two examines the ways in which each has handled the ideas of postmodernism. In Part Three, Schilb compares their new shared interest in personal writing, their different attitudes toward collaboration, and issues that arise when literary theories travel into composition. With this book, readers will benefit from an enriched understanding of the theoretical perspectives, institutional conditions, and pedagogical strategies involved in teaching English.

shows how expressivism is historically related to romanticism and interprets this connection in a positive light. It historicizes and then theorizes some of the primary texts in the romantic/expressivist tradition of language study and production. The book connects William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, and John Dewey, among others, with contemporary compositionists such as Donald Murray, Ann Berthoff, James Britton, and Peter Elbow. Using the history of romanticism, the author shows how expressivism relates to social construction and argues that reclaiming a romantic heritage enriches contemporary composition theories. By historicizing the expressivist tradition and connecting the texts of both the romantic poets and Mill, Arnold, and Dewey with education in their times and ours, demands a reconsideration of the expressivist composition theories that have been berated and misunderstood for the past few years. This book is the first to re-examine our understanding of what it means to be romantic, while connecting that new understanding to both education in general and writing instruction in particular. It does not ignore or simplify the current arguments condemning expressivism, but devotes considerable thought to the summary of and response to critics of expressivism. is an important book for scholars, theorists, practitioners of composition, and graduate students. Those devoted to the academic discourse, social constructivism/social-epistemic approach to teaching and scholarship will find Romancing Rhetorics inspiring reading.

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