It has become a commonplace in scholarship on teacher response: viewing comments as a between teacher and student, an ongoing discussion between the teacher reader and the student writer, a conversation. Erika Lindemann advises teachers to make comments that create a kind of dialogue between teacher and student and keep the lines of communication open (216). Chris Anson encourages teachers to write comments that are more casual than formal, as if rhetorically sitting next to the writer, collaborating, suggesting,

Alan W. France. Composition As a Cultural Practice. Westport, CN: Bergin and Garvey, 1994. 171 pages. Mark Wiley, Barbara Gleason, and Louise Wetherbee Phelps, editors. Composition in Four Keys: An Inquiry into the Field. Mountain Valley, California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1995. 608 pages. A. L. Becker. Beyond Translation: Essays in Modern Philology. University of Michigan Press, 1995. 431 + ix pages. Sherrie L. Grandin. Romancing Rhetorics: Social Expressivist Perspectives on the Teaching of Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 1995. 166 pages. Mike Rose. Possible Lives. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. 454 pages. $24.95. Richard McKeon. On Knowing—The Natural Sciences. Compiled by David B. Owen. Edited by David B. Owen and Zahava K. McKeon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 405 pages. $65.00 hardcover, $17.95 paper. Jasper Neel. Aristotle's Voice: Rhetoric, Theory and Writing in America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 259 pages. $24.95.

Eugene Garver. Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Character. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. xii + 325 pages. Helen Fox. Listening to the World: Cultural Issues in Academic Writing. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1994. xxi +161 pages. W. Ross Winterowd. A Teacher's Introduction to Composition in the Rhetorical Tradition. Urbana: NCTE, 1994. 130 pages. Marcello Pera. Discourses of Science. Translated by Clarissa Botsford. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 250 pages. Pera, Marcello, and William R. Shea, eds. Persuading Science: The Art of Scientific Rhetoric. Canton, MA: Science History, 1991. Perelman, Chaïm, and L. Olbrechts‐Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1969. Planck, Max. Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers. Trans. F. Gaynor. London: Williams and Norgate, 1950. Simons, Herbert, ed. The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. Haig Bosmajian, Metaphor and Reason in Judicial Opinions. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992. Fredric G. Gale, Political Literacy: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Possibility of Justice. Interruptions: Border Testimony(ies) and Critical Discoursed). Albany: State U of New York P, 1994. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, eds. The Rhetoric of Law. Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought 4. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994.

Last year, I was invited to speak at a conference whose theme was the feminization of composition.2 This topic coincided with another discussion I had been following in our journals: the emergence of Rhetoric and Composition as a scholarly field. In preparing my talk, I began to raise several questions like: What is meant by feminization in these discussions? Can we assume that composition is feminized? Are the discourses on disciplinary formation and on feminization already woven together? If not, should they be? This essay explores these questions, making distinctions and telling stories that offer an alternative perspective. Let me begin with the feminization of composition. My rereading of many of these discussions3 leads me to conclude that their statements about feminization apply largely to composition instruction, not to Rhetoric and Composition as a scholarly field.4 The two reasons generally advanced are the numerical predominance of women and the nature of composition pedagogy. Accounts agree that women do most of the teaching of writing from the university level to elementary school as either full- or part-time instructors. Many descriptions of recent pedagogies maintain that instructional practices, particularly of expressive and critical pedagogies, are marks of feminization because they are collaborative, student centered, and nurturing. A few, however, dissent. Susan Jarratt and Evelyn Ashton-Jones, for example, problematize collaboration as a desirable feminine pedagogy. Lil Brannon contends that the expressivists and people like Giroux, Shor, Freire, and Rose are reinscribing patriarchy by invoking masculine heroic narratives of conquest as traditional male Romantic heroes who, like the rugged individual in the Dead Poet's Society, work against all odds to make a difference. Some historical accounts of nineteenth-century composition position it as feminized in contrast to rhetorical instruction and the emerging professionalization of English Studies. Robert Connors argues that the demise of agonistic rhetorical instruction in persuasive public discourse, which he contends had largely characterized male education up through 1850, was related to the entrance of significant numbers of women into higher education in the nineteenth century. These women were excluded from taking oral rhetoric and assigned to a more appropriate course called composition. He

in the student's hands, Elbow's approach the teaching of writing appears be revolutionary and freeing. Using such techniques as freewriting, open-ended writing, and other forms of private writing, Elbow encourages students tap their own experience as a source for their writing and elevates the student's own resources over those of the academic community. Elbow's focus on the psychological and physical drives of the writer, the desire be loved (Sharing and Responding) and the compulsion write (Embracing 73), makes writing something that the teacher can share, but apparently not control or appropriate. Recently, however, composition theorists have been critical of the conservative political implications of Elbow's pedagogy, arguing that Elbow's rhetoric, defined variously as Romantic expressivism or expressionistic, fails empower students effect change through language. These critics argue that Elbow's theory hides the social of language (Faigley 531) and teaches students how to assert a private vision, a vision which, despite its uniqueness, finally represents humankind's best nature (Berlin 487). Notably though, those who criticize Elbow for being antisocial focus only on what Elbow has say about writers and writing. In doing so, they overlook what Elbow has say about the most social aspect of writing-the role of the reader and the exchange between writer and reader. In this essay I will examine Elbow's rhetoric of reading in order suggest that these taxonomic critiques oversimplify his theoretical and pedagogical position within the field of composition studies. In fact, a closer examination of Elbow's rhetoric of reading reveals that the problem is not so much that he ignores the social, it's that he tries control it. Like those who criticize him, Elbow would like help students demystify the social processes of the Academy, balance the power between writer and reader within the social space of the composition classroom. In his attempt control the transaction between writer and reader, however, Elbow reproduces the same hierarchy he wishes dismantle. I will suggest, nonetheless, that there is a means by which the more liberating aspects of Elbow's rhetoric of reading might be kept intact.

question, should teachers bring their politics into the classroom, is a question that is vague and, in the final analysis, only useful as a scare-tactic. It may sound straightforward, but it quickly dissolves into a variety of more specific possible interpretations: Should a teacher insist that students adopt in their writing a particular political position under threat of failure; should a teacher encourage students to adopt a particular political position; should a teacher argue for a particular political position in class; should a teacher expose students to political positions that are contrary to those the students already hold; should a teacher encourage or permit students to express any and all of their beliefs and opinions, even those that other students might find offensive; should a teacher show students how to critically examine beliefs, political or otherwise, and ask students to critically examine their own beliefs; should a teacher raise the possibility that the beliefs we have come to hold are interconnected and symbolically charged in ways that may prevent us from straightforwardly examining them; should a teacher design assignments around controversial political issues and insist that students engage (e.g., argue with others and defend their own position); should a teacher avoid all references to specific political issues and train students to write clear, grammatically correct prose? And, of course, there are many other ways of hearing the question. If we are to resist the question, should teachers bring their politics into the classroom, then, in favor of a question or questions that bring out more clearly what is at stake for us in the discussion of politics in the classroom, we may want to begin with a closer examination of the relationship between educational and political aims-which is precisely the direction we seem to be going in, if articles such as Patricia Bizzell's The of Virtue, Richard Marius's Politics in the Classroom, Louise Wetherbee Phelps', A Constrained Vision of the Writing Classroom, Donald Lazere's Teaching

Within his substantial body of nonfiction, there is, I think, no single metaphor that better describes John McPhee's relationship with his readers and his subjects than does the title of his third collection of essays. 1 Giving Good Weight, the lead essay in the collection of the same name, is an account of greenmarkets in New York in the 1970s. As one of McPhee's subjects tells us, the markets were planned mainly as 'a natural answer to a twofold problem': loss of farmland in the metropolitan area and a lack of 'fresh, decent food' in the city, but it was hoped that, with the right attitude and a little luck, they would also start conversations, help resuscitate neighborhoods, brighten the aesthetic of the troubled town (34). It is characteristic of McPhee and crucial to our reading of the essay that the perspective we are given on the interaction between buyers and sellers is both McPhee's own and, to a large extent, that of his principal subjects. Characteristic, because McPhee consistently takes the side of those about whom he writes in his nonfiction; and in this case, he has done so quite literally: as the essay opens, the author is standing on the greenmarketers' side of the table, selling vegetables, discovering first-hand how it feels to face the urban hordes, who slit the tomatoes with [their] fingernails, excavate the cheese with their thumbs, pulp the nectarines and rape the sweet corn (3). Crucial, because in taking the greenmarketers' perspective, McPhee establishes an identification that has important consequences for our reading of the entire essay. They are good people, these greenmarketers honest, hardworking, and committed to what they do-and McPhee's ethos benefits from his respectful and respected association with them. The governing metaphor captures the essence of the piece and of McPhee's ethos in almost all of his nonfiction. Giving good weight: apart from its prominent post as title of the title essay, it is a phrase used only three times, yet it reverberates throughout one's reading; or more accurately, it galvanizes all the unspoken responses one has to the varied themes that play across the essay. To good weight means, literally, to be generous when selling produce, to give three-and-a-quarter pounds of tomatoes for the price of three. But it also means, not only metaphorically but actually, the fostering of human fellowship and trust-the forging of an almost palpable bond through an act of commercial generosity. When customers find out that a young teacher selling

Miriam Brody. Manly Writing: Gender, Rhetoric, and the Rise of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. 247 pages. Carol J. Singley and S. Elizabeth Sweeney, eds. Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narratives by Women. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. xxvi + 400 pages. Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran, eds. Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth‐Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993.281 pages. Donovan J. Ochs. Consolatory Rhetoric: Grief, Symbol, and Ritual in the Greco‐Roman Era. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. xiv + 130 pages. $29.95 cloth. Walter L. Reed. Dialogues of the Word: The Bible as Literature According to Bakhtin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. xvi + 223 pages. Barbara Warnick. The Sixth Canon: Belletristic Rhetorical Theory and Its French Antecedents. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1993. 176 pages. John Frederick Reynolds, ed. Rhetorical Memory and Delivery: Classical Concepts for Contemporary Composition and Communication. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993. xii + 170. $19.95 paper. Edward M. White. Teaching and Assessing Writing. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey‐Bass Publishers, 1994. xxii + 331 pages. $34.95. Sharon Crowley. Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. New York: Macmillan College Publishing Company, 1994. 365 pages. Victor Villanueva, Jr. Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1993. xviii + 150 pages.

teach composition using an enthymematic approach. Or I might say, teach composition from the or the enthymeme. Unfortunately, the word enthymeme is more likely to alienate composition teachers than to attract their interest and attention, despite growing body of scholarship that positions the enthymeme at the very heart of the composing process. According to the viewpoint that emerges from this scholarship, enthymematic reasoning is fundamental to cognition and discourse, and hence to writing. If so, then talking about the enthymeme ought to be an essential and powerful way of talking about the composing process, and of it (Grimaldi, Gage, Green, Walker, Porter, Hood, Emmel, among others). Part of the difficulty of explaining what is meant by teaching enthymematically resides in the word enthymeme itself, which, unlike more familiar composition terminology (thesis, evidence, conclusion), lacks common and shared meaning, even recognition, for both students and teachers alike. As one of my students complained, couldn't even find it in the dictionary! Other students have been perturbed when their other teachers do not recognize the word. As means of understanding and discussing composition, the term enthymeme is still in the process of gaining definition and application-that is, of becoming grounded in composition theory, apart from the realms of formal logic and classical rhetorical theory. The age-old tendency to reduce the enthymeme to a truncated syllogism, or to mere figure of speech with little rhetorical potential beyond the moment of utterance, robs it of the fullness from which its pedagogical potential derives (see, for example, Conley's and Poster's surveys of ancient and modem interpretations of the enthymeme). Yet the enthymeme is not just logical paradigm (statement 1 is true because statement 2 is true) but also conceptualization of rich set of relationships with the potential of being expressed in multitude of ways, of which the enthymematic and syllogistic paradigms are only the most schematic and thesis-like. A successful essay is no less enthymematic for not being

Jacqueline de Romilly. The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Oxford University Press, 1992. 260 pages. $75.00. Ira Shor. Empowering Education. University of Chicago Press, 1992.286 + vii pages. Lester Faigley. Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 1992. 285 pages. Crowley, Sharon. The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current‐Traditional Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. xviii + 207 pages. Horner, Winifred Bryan. Nineteenth‐Century Scottish Rhetoric: The American Connection. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. x + 211 pages. Johnson, Nan. Nineteenth‐Century Rhetoric in North America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.313 pages. Rewriting the nineteenth century Chris M. Anson, Joan Graham, David A. Jolliffe, Nancy S. Shapiro, Carolyn H. Smith. Scenarios for Teaching Writing: Contexts for Discussion and Reflective Practice. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1993. xiii + 160 pages. Mark Backman, Sophistication: Rhetoric and the Rise of Self‐Consciousness. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1991. Douglas Walton. The Place of Emotion in Argument. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. 294 pages. $45.00 cloth, $14.95 paper.

In 1976 Mina Shaughnessy invoked the phrase converting the natives (235) describe an undesirable attitude for a teacher of composition. In her article Diving In: An Introduction Basic Writing, she outlines four stages of development for composition teachers, of which converting the natives is the second. The tendency of teachers at this stage is see themselves as missionaries who initiate the unenlightened into the true path of correct writing. At this stage the teacher's goal is to carry the technology of advanced literacy the inhabitants of an underdeveloped country (235). Joseph Harris also mentions the term conversion in his 1989 critique of the use of discourse communities in the composition classroom (16). We have, Harris suggests, pictured various discourse communities as fundamentally different, in fact, so fundamentally different that we are at a loss explain how students make the break with former communities in order enter new communities. Harris describes the way we have tended think of students

The uses of postmodern theory in rhetoric and composition studies have been the object of considerable abuse of late. Figures of some repute in the field-the likes of Maxine Hairston and Peter Elbow-as well as anonymous voices from the Burkean Parlor section of Rhetoric Review-most recently, TS, graduate student, and KF, voice speaking for a general English teacher audience (192)-have joined the chorus of protest. The charges have included willful obscurity, selfindulgence, elitism, pomposity, intellectual impoverishment, and host of related offenses. Although my name usually appears among the accused, I am sympathetic with those undergoing the difficulties of the first encounter with this discussion. (I exclude Professor Hairston in her irresponsible charge that its recent contributors in College English are low-risk Marxists who write very badly [695] and who should be banned from NCTE publications.) I experienced the same frustration when I first encountered the different but closely related language of rhetoric and composition studies some fifteen years ago. I wondered, for example, if I would ever grasp the complexities of Aristotle or Quintilian or Kenneth Burke or I. A. Richards, not to mention the new language of the writing process. A bit later I was introduced to French poststructuralism, and once again I found myself wandering in strange seas, and this time alone. In reading rhetoric, after all, I had the benefit of numerous commentators to help me along-the work of Kinneavy and Lauer and Corbett and Emig, for example. In reading Foucault and Derrida in the late seventies, on the other hand, I was largely on my own since the commentaries were as difficult as the originals, and those few that were readable were often (as even I could see) wrong. Nonetheless, with the help of informal reading groups made up of colleagues and students, I persisted in my efforts to come to terms with this difficult body of thought. I was then, as now, convinced that both rhetorical studies and postmodern speculation offered strikingly convergent and remarkably compelling visions for conducting my life as teacher and citizen. It is clear to me that rhetoric and composition studies has arrived as serious field of study because it has taken into account the best that has been thought and said about its concerns from the past and the present, and I have found that postmodern work in historical and contemporary rhetorical theory has done much to further this effort.

That errors in writing are somehow is no news to the field of composition. Yet there is a recurring discrepancy in the approach compositionists take toward this dimension of written error. On the one hand, what counts as an (or as correct) in writing is generally recognized as social: most compositionists freely acknowledge the of the controversial imposition of standards of correct notation as a set of arbitrary conventions. On the other hand, the production of particular errors is regularly identified and treated as social but as individual, evidence of an individual writer's cognitive or perceptual difficulties, trouble knowing and/or seeing error. We might account cynically for the discrepancy between recognition of what might be called the sociality of errors and the focus of research and teaching on error as a sign of ethical irresponsibility. I would argue, however, that this discrepancy results from an impasse in how the sociality of error has been theorized. To acknowledge that errors are seems to mean primarily that one acknowledges the of the regularization of conventions for writing English, a regularization which, coincidentally, has favored the syntactic forms of dialects spoken by more powerful social groups. But all this seems to be viewed as afait accompli, history in the sense of something in the past about which there is little now to be done, a digression that takes attention away from the immediate problems of our students and their writing. The proper focus of attention for researchers and teachers of writing, it seems largely to be assumed, is on matters of student cognition and perception of error. In her 1985 review of Research on Error and Correction, Glynda Hull testifies to this state of affairs. Hull acknowledges that [m]ost of the controversy correctness in writing has finally to do with power, status, and class, but observes that much recent research on error can be viewed as walking a middle ground in the controversy, neither despairing that students must learn a privileged language nor grieving overlong that there is a cost (165, 166). This research takes as its purpose not a delineation of the social and political implications of error and correctness but an investigation of those mental processes involved in making errors and correcting them (167).1 Note that researchers pursuing such matters do deny the social controversy surrounding errors. But

George A. Kennedy, trans. Aristotle: On Rhetoric (subtitled A Theory of Civic Discourse). Oxford University Press, 1991. 335 + xiii pages. The Importance of George A. Kennedy's Aristotle: On Rhetoric Kennedy's Aristotle: On Rhetoric as a Pedagogical Tool Kennedy's Rhetoric as a Contribution to Rhetorical Theory Kennedy's Aristotle: on Rhetoric as a Work of Translation∗ James J. Murphy, ed. A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Twentieth‐Century America. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1990. 241 + v pages. Teaching the History of Writing Instruction Thomas Miller. The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon. Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. 318 + viii pages. Patricia Harkin and John Schilb, eds. Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in the Postmodern Age. New York: Modern Language Association, 1991. iv + 242 pages. Sandra Stotsky, ed. Connecting Civic Education and Language Education: The Contemporary Challenge. New York: Teachers College Press of Columbia University, 1991. Janis Forman, ed. New Visions of Collaborative Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1992. 200 pages. $23.50.

Over twenty years ago, Robert Zoellner argued that our post hoc, artifactual approach to writing instruction, our teaching students by commenting on final drafts, is an especially inefficient system. In his College English monograph, Zoellner notes that in directing both our and our students' attention to characteristics of their written artifacts rather than to characteristics of the scribal act which produced those artifacts, we are dealing with effects only and thus adroitly avoiding the problem of cause altogether (272). In trying to teach writing by commenting on student papers, we are, he says, confusing texts with people, written words with the act of writing, the lever with the laboratory rat (280), history with behavior, the past with the present (283). In our confusion we end up trying to teach the page rather than the person, the product rather than the process, which, he notes, is patently hopeless endeavor (280). In other words, Zoellner implies, we are confusing declarative knowledge with procedural knowledge and thus teaching the what of writing rather than the how of writing. Four years ago in a lecture at Colorado State University, Zoellner was still voicing this same critique. In a telling analogy, he said:

Andrea A. Lunsford, Helene Moglen, and James Slevin, eds., The Future of Doctoral Studies in English. New York: Modern Language Association, 1989. xii + 179 pages. Patrick Brantlinger, Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America. New York: Routledge, 1990. xi + 212 pages. Bernard Bergonzi, Exploding English: Criticism, Theory, Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. viii + 240 pages. Reed Way Dasenbrock, ed. Redrawing the Lines: Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction, and Literary Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 263 pages. John D. Schaeffer, Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990. 181 pages. $25.75. Donald A. Daiker and Max Morenberg, eds. The Writing Teacher as Researcher: Essays in the Theory and Practice of Class‐Based Research. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1990. xi + 357 pages. $19.50. Alice Glarden Brand, The Psychology of Writing: The Affective Experience. Foreword by Peter Elbow. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. 259 pages.

When Mary Belenky, Blythe Clinchy, Nancy Goldberger, and Jill Tarule published their book, Women's Ways of Knowing, they essentially waved red flag before loyal disciples of William Perry's developmental scheme. These researchers question the Perry model because, while its methodology allowed for the incorporation of interviews with female subjects, its conclusions were based only on data from interviews with males. Belenky et al. argue that Perry's research might indicate that women conform to the male pattern, but the research strategy itself was deficient in its ability to uncover developmental patterns which more accurately describe the female experience. What Perry may have been measuring, Belenky et al. argue, is the process by which a relatively homogeneous group of people are socialized into and make sense of system of values, standards and objectives, specifically, how Harvard University promotes and encourages relativistic thought and how male students respond (15).1 To say the least, the resulting confusion, concern, and debate engendered by Belenky et al.'s assertions have influenced wide range of academic disciplines. Composition teachers are certainly not immune. Female students now constitute significant percentage of the college population. To the extent that we have been influenced by and made use of the Perry development model, we may be applying teaching methods developed for and around male students. Belenky et al. alert us to the possibility that William Perry's scheme may not tell us everything we need to know about our female students. Exactly what does the Perry scheme tell us? In 1970 William Perry described the developmental stages of college students in the following way: 1) Entering freshmen are dualists. They view knowledge as collection of information falling into two categories: right and wrong. This habit of structuring the world into opposites-we and they, good and bad, correct and incorrectprompts dualists to assume that truth is inarguable and can be dispensed through the proper authorities. Learning is therefore passive process. 2) Students become multiplists as they are exposed to the spectacle of authorities disagreeing among themselves. Recognizing that often there are no clearcut answers and that truth is not absolute, multiplists become functional

neither my stories of teaching nor those of many of my feminist colleagues. These practitioners, along with many women and men writing about composition studies today, urge us to design curricula to empower women and other students marginalized in relation to the dominant discourse. In their stories we see them empowering those women, who experience life and the academy from a marginal perspective, to write. Moving away from the developmental theories of William H. Perry and Jean Piaget, these researchers cite studies by women about the different ways women know and write to justify the ways they encourage their female students' literacy.2 But these feminists do not describe the nonmarginalized students many of the rest of us meet in our classes-those men, women, and culturally different ones who already belong in the academy. How many of those of us who are feminists and composition teachers interact only with students eager to be transformed by the political agendas of feminist, or for that matter, even composition pedagogy? The affirmation in the first part of my title gives away the ending of my story,

Rhetoric as a college-level discipline entered the nineteenth century as one of the most respected fields in higher education. The teacher of rhetoric at that time was an honored and respected figure, often occupying a chaired position like Edinburgh's Regius Professorship or Harvard's Boylston Chair. When, however, we look at the teacher of rhetoric a mere century later, what a sad change we find. Rhetoric has changed in a hundred years from an academic desideratum to a grim apprenticeship, to be escaped as soon as practicable. Instead of being an esteemed intellectual figure in community and campus, the rhetoric teacher of 1900 is increasingly marginalized, overworked, and ill-paid. Instead of being a senior professor, he, or she, is an instructor or a graduate student. Instead of being sought by students, rhetoric courses are despised and sneered at, and their teachers have fallen from the empyrean of named chairs to the status of permanent underclass teachers: oppressed, badly paid, ill-used, and secretly despised. In this essay I want to examine some of the issues of labor and status that have surrounded the composition underclass, which is with us today in forms that would be all too familiar to the writing teachers of 1900. The creation of the composition underclass cannot be understood without examining an essential change that took place in America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was the shift from oral to written discourse within rhetorical training, with its result an incredible rise in the amount of individual academic work that each teacher of rhetoric must do. This overwork, along with the increasing bureaucratization of the universities, allowed the formation of permanent low-status jobs in composition which were not filled by upwardly mobile scholars, who increasingly gravitated to literary work, which was easier, offered a lighter load, and was given more respect.

(1989). Disciplines and communities, “armies” and “monasteries,” and the teaching of composition. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 137-146.

More often than not, when people write about the relationship of literature and writing, they either argue about the place of literature in composition classes (as Barbara and Francis Lide do in Literature in the Composition Class) or discuss, in the spirit of writing-across-thecurriculum, how to use journals, response assignments, and critical essays to teach literature (an approach Joseph Comprone takes in Integrating the Acts of Reading and about Literature). My purpose in this essay is different from either of those. I hope to suggest a number of the values-for student understanding and appreciation of literature, and for the effective teaching of literature and writing-that can come from having students work at their own creative writing in undergraduate literature classes. For some years, Twentieth Century and Fiction Writing alternated in my teaching load. One course features works in which literary technique is quite important and often very challenging for students, and the other course helped students develop some mastery of literary technique. By thinking about how to make both courses work well, I discovered that many of the activities and exercises of the fiction writing class helped literature students to understand key concepts of technique and to appreciate the subtlety and craft of the works they read. For those unfamiliar with typical exercises of fiction-writing classes, let me offer a brief list of activities that carry over into literature classes:

In the past few years, several authors have suggested that we reflect on traditional conceptions of rhetoric to see what they can tell us about our own concerns. For instance, the authors whose articles appear in James J. Murphy's 1982 MLA anthology, The Rhetorical Tradition and Modem Writing, would agree that a study of our rhetorical tradition can teach us a good deal about the problems of the present, and they make many comparisons between ancient and modern to illustrate what they mean. Comparing rhetorical pedagogies is another promising area of study, although such comparison may at first seem to involve incongruities. Proposing, as this essay does, that there is a fundamental likeness between the modern technical writing case study and the impersonation exercises of classical rhetoric-in which the student plays Zeus excoriating the Sun-God for lending his chariot to Phaethon, or some of Caesar's troops arguing whether to commit suicide or not-would initially seem imprudent. On first glance, these two teaching methods seem pretty far apart. However, a detailed comparison of the modern case study with the impersonation and with another ancient exercise called suasoria not only is possible but can point out striking similarities. More important, such a comparison can validate the educational value of the case study, point up its grounding in rhetorical principles, and suggest some broader uses the modern methodology might serve. But before I proceed to a comparison, let me briefly describe each method. A modern case, to use a summary of a case from one of the best modern texts, goes something like this:

Winifred Bryan Homer, Rhetoric in the Classical Tradition. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. xvii + 462 pages. Ira Shor, ed., Freire for the Classroom: A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, Heinemann, 1987. Afterword by Paulo Freire. 237 pages. Erika Lindemann, Longman Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric: 1984–1985. Longman, 1987. xviii + 318 pages. Longman Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric: 1986. Longman, 1988. xv + 249 pages. Richard M. Coe, Toward a Grammar of Passages. CCCC Studies in Writing and Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. 123 pages.

She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Her face curved gently into a soft oval, her skin too light for our Italian heritage, her eyes wide, brown. Waist-length, almond colored hair fell where it pleased. Her voice softly drew me near, overcoming sixteen years of shyness. We talked, walked, picked wild strawberries and laughed with our mouths full, the red juice spilling a little even as we lurched to catch it. Her voice never wavered, never rose beyond that tone that made me catch my breath to hear every word. Like Shakespeare's Dark Lady or Wyeth's Helga, she kept me from seeing any of the rest of that sunny July day. I returned home that summer to begin my first play, dedicating it to her. To her presence. To what she could inspire in me. For fourteen years between that first play's performance and our family reunion last summer-caught in the fast-paced life of college, high-school teaching, graduate school, and gaining tenure-I forgot the sense of beauty Marla could inspire in me. Until last summer when I saw her again. Almost instantly, I felt guilty for all that writing I'd put off in 14 years. All those ideas, feelings, insights I'd been excited about but then failed to commit to paper. Still, though I regretted the waste, that feeling of beauty had returned. Only this time even stronger because now I better understand what is at stake. Plato, Shelley, Steven Weinberg are right. Beauty evokes in all of us a universal urge to breathe it in, to seek it out again and again, to share it, often to write about it, to force others to feel it even though it defies such attempts. And isn't this awe for life what we continuously search for in our lives, even in our work places? Don't we all hunger for that feeling when our instincts tell us we've thought the right thought, made the right moves, heard the right words, said just the right thing to express our feelings, relate an idea, delight an audience, or move another human to action? There is in us that urge to think, act, hear, say just what fits the occasion. And we usually know intuitively when what just passed did in fact fit; we would change nothing to improve it. We yearn, we might say, to partake of the beautiful.

When we teach, we tell a story to our students and to ourselves, a story about the acquisition of knowledge. The telling of this tale is what we usually refer to as pedagogy. A syllabus, in this view, is a kind of fiction inhabited by nonfictional characters who journey together through the plot of the story. Every syllabus, of course, tells a slightly different tale. However, when a syllabus is codified into a textbook-that most maligned of literary genres-it begins to resemble something more akin to what Jean-Franvois Lyotard calls a master narrative, a story around which other are constructed. According to Lyotard, even in an age of science, narration is the quintessential form in which how-to knowledge is established and transmitted. I would argue that in the largely literate and institutionalized societies of the West, textbooks provide us with many of these culturally essential of knowledge. In this essay I propose to anatomize the stories that four influential composition textbooks tell, both to reveal their pedagogical and epistemological suppositions and also to uncover the master narratives that give their theories of writing consequence and shape. The four texts are Rhetoric: Discovery and Change by Richard Young, Alton Becker, and Kenneth Pike; ForminglThinking/Writing by Ann Berthoff; Teaching Composing by William Coles; and A Short Course in Writing by Kenneth A. Bruffee. In the case of these four, at least, the tale told follows the ancient pattern of heroic adventure, a pattern of separation, initiation, and return. Joseph Campbell's comparative study of eastern and occidental mythologies, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, identifies a basic form of this heroic story, the monomyth.

Gary Tate, ed., Teaching Composition: Twelve Bibliographical Essays. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University, 1987. xiv + 434 pages. Stephen M. North, The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook, 1987. 403 pages.

Donald Stewart, The Versatile Writer. Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1986. 381 pages. Sentence Combining: A Rhetorical Perspective. Ed. Donald A. Daiker, Andrew Kerek, and Max Morenberg. Southern Illinois University Press, 1985, xxi + 386 pages. Beverly L. Clark, Talking about Writing: A Guide for Tutor and Teacher Conferences. The University of Michigan Press, 1985. 225 pages.

The renewed interest in rhetorical studies during past twenty years has caused many scholars to look back to beginnings of education in English as such programs were developed during latter half of nineteenth century. Most would probably agree with William Riley Parker that it was teaching of freshman composition that quickly entrenched English departments in college and university structure (347), and that freshman program continues to account for size and power of most English departments. But in spite of this, until recently graduate education in English has been focused almost exclusively on literary study. Even as progressive a thinker as Richard Ohmann was at one point moved to write, Literature is our subject matter, and, this being so, an inquiry into state of profession must ask how we stand vis-a'-vis literature (Structure of an Academic Field 359). Although Ohmann subsequently repudiated his statement (English in America 20), such an outlook is revealing of climate existing in most English departments for greater part of twentieth century. By seventies, however, scattered voices began to protest pattern and purpose of graduate training in English. John Gerber argued that traditional literary ignored realities of profession, and that graduate education should be devoted to the acquisition of skills, not merely subject matter (315). He specifically encouraged both M.A. and Ph.D. candidate . . . to make writing, theories of writing, and theories of teaching writing an area of specialization (316). Gerber doubted that such a reform in curriculum would come to pass, and, in fact, traditional literary study has changed little since his article appeared in 1977. But reform has taken place, not by revamping entire curriculum, but by opening up new programs in rhetoric-what is still usually termed option (as opposed to mainstream of literary studies). By 1980 William Covino, Nan Johnson, and Michael Feehan were able to identify twenty graduate programs in English offering a concentration in rhetoric (although some of these programs were

the writer's audience. Writing involves moving material from the inside the outside. We need only consult a few recent composition texts see how this inner/outer metaphor shapes the language we use talk about teaching writing. We tell students that the writer's mind is a kind of a box-a storehouse or reservoir, a pool of thoughts, filled with tremendous reserves draw upon. We speak of student writers opening the lid of the mind in order free what is stored inside. As teachers of writing, we want help students tap these sources, sift through your memory, and dredge up ideas. We want help students overcome writer's block, to unlock your mind and release information.' To make this happen, we talk about brainstorming, in which we make a frontal assault open the stronghold of the mind. And when this happens, we call the effect linguistic fluency, the flowing outward of inner speech from the reservoir of the mind. The dualism of this inner/outer metaphor, moreover, permeates much of the discourse of composition studies. Writing, many teachers, researchers, and theorists assume, begins inside, in the inner speech of private verbal thought, and is only gradually transformed into the outer written speech of public text. We habitually think of the process of composing as a movement from monologue, where writers address primarily themselves, dialogue, where writers address others. In this view composing transforms what is inside the writer's head into an external text that can stand by itself. Composing, that is, converts the associative, idiosyncratic, self-referential language that writers use talk themselves into autonomous texts that supply the interpretive contexts, logical connections, and explicit meanings readers expect of public discourse. James Britton's expressive and transactional functions, Janet Emig's reflexive and extensive modes of writing, and Linda Flower's writer-based and reader-based prose, however they may differ in conception and formulation, all assume the polarity of private and public language and an inner-to-outer directionality in composing, a movement, as Flower puts it, from thinking in code

Rise B. Axelrod and Charles R. Cooper. The St. Martin's Guide to Writing. 687 pages. New Directions in Composition Research. Ed. Richard Beach and Lillian S. Bridwell. Perspectives in Writing Research 1. The Guilford Press, 1984. 418 pages. The Process Reader. Ed. Richard Ray, Gary A. Olson, and James DeGeorge. Prentice‐Hall, 1985. 437 pages. Teaching College Students to Read Analytically. Jan Cooper, Rick Evans, and Elizabeth Robertson. NCTE, 1985. 58 pages.

ly to students, but create an impression for some that the techniques are purely activities for fun, trivial interludes that don't contribute substantially to a finished paper. In addition, some teachers fear the freedom these techniques allow students and believe more controlled instruction is needed. On the other hand, structured heuristics such as Burke's Pentad and Young, Becker, and Pike's Tagmemic Grid provide systems to guide inquiry, but often are so abstract, acontextual and complex that they are difficult for students to apply and sometimes seem to intrude on rather than to aid the composing process. I Aware of problems with both approaches and having little time to present them fully, a majority of us, I would guess, take the middle road and briefly introduce students to invention techniques before quickly moving on to other concerns.2 Problems in reconciling free and structured heuristics have appeared in several articles.3 In the end, a number of theorists say that structure and freedom, reason and intuition, consciousness and unconsciousness aren't mutually exclusive: Each school of heuristics contains elements of the other. For example, free writing theorists Ken Macrorie and Peter Elbow advocate that after students use automatic or stream-of-consciousness writing, they should consciously seek patterns in their free writing-or in Elbow's words, an emerging center of gravity (20), which can then be used to generate and organize more discourse. And structuralist Richard Young points out the guiding, not dictating nature of heuristics. Young emphasizes that systematic heuristics do not always work consciously: Although more or less systematic, a heuristic search is not wholly conscious or mechanical; intuition, relevant knowledge, and skill are also necessary. A heuristic is an explicit strategy for effective guessing ( 135). Since the two approaches contain aspects of each other, there should be pedagogies that integrate both heuristics. But how? I believe a way of addressing the problem of how teachers can integrate free and structured inquiry effectively can be found in the classical progymnasmata, exercises designed to train the classical student in the art of inventio. While the classical tradition may suggest a rhetoric that is unduly prescriptive to some

If you teach writing, you should write. That elementary but radical insight, probably first voiced by Janet Emig fourteen years ago in her influential monograph, Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, has become one of the key components of the new paradigm for teaching composition, endorsed by virtually everyone in the profession who consults or publishes about ways to improve the teaching of The reasoning is simple: Teachers who do not engage in the writing process themselves cannot adequately understand the complex dynamics of the process, cannot empathize with their students' problems, and are in no position either to challenge or to endorse the recommendations and admonitions of the textbooks they are using. Nor can they do as many writing teachers suggest and say, Let's just throw away the textbook and work on our writing. The writing teacher who doesn't write is in no more position to diagnose difficulties and offer advice than a soccer coach who has never played soccer. In fact, much of the success of the National Writing Project's workshops for teachers all over the country has come because its leaders have started teachers writing and talking to each other about But just because so many people in the profession now accept the principle and recommend that writing teachers should write doesn't mean that those who believe in the theory find it easy to practice. In fact, if you are one of the new generation of writing teachers who believe strongly that you should write, you may only have made your life more difficult. You are now enlightened, but as a result you may feel guilty and frustrated; guilty because you aren't writing, frustrated because you don't know what to do about it. Probably the first thing you should realize is that you're not unusual. We don't have good data on how many writing teachers don't write, but a few years ago The Chronicle of Higher Education published figures estimating that at least two-thirds of college professors publish nothing after the dissertation. And if you think about the faculty in your department you may realize that few of them seem to be writing, including those who teach composition. So you shouldn't feel as if you are the only sinner and that everyone but you is It's not true. But knowing that you have plenty of company doesn't help your problem.

The teaching of English grammar in the nineteenth century can be a rewarding subject of study because it reveals attitudes toward language and language teaching that also shaped the pedagogy of rhetoric, composition, and literature during that period. The prescriptive attitude toward grammar and usage inherited from the eighteenth century was a powerful determinant both in grammar teaching and in the teaching of speaking, reading, and writing, where taste, facility, precision, and perspicuity (clarity) were central issues. And when continental notions of inductive (we would say progressive) teaching begin to have an effect on American education, the signs of change appear earliest in the school grammar texts. In this essay I will describe the main strands of theory and practice in early nineteenth-century grammar teaching and then show how these analytic and synthetic approaches were combined in grammar texts around the middle of the century, contributing to an eclectic theory of expression employed in both grammar and composition teaching by the 1890s.

(1986). The Perry scheme and the teaching of writing. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 152-158.

(1984). The way of a large house: Synthesis in teaching composition. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 4-12.

C. H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon, Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing. Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1984. 171 pages. Composition and Literature: Bridging the Gap. Ed. Winifred Bryan Horner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. New Essays in Technical and Scientific Communication: Research, Theory, Practice. Ed. Paul V. Anderson, R. John Brockmann, and Carolyn R. Miller. Baywood's Technical Communications Series: Volume 2. Farmingdale, NY: Bay wood Publishing Co., 1983. 254 pages. Persuasive Messages, Ruth Anne Clark. New York: Harper & Row 1984. vi + 250 pages.

Like people who keep returning to the same spot looking for a lost object, composition teachers sometimes retrace their steps, seeking the formulas for successful writing instruction. In both cases, those who go back without learning from their search show more hope than wisdom. Recently, a number of leaders in our profession have urged that we recombine literature and composition, arguing that the two disciplines complement each other. However, if we recombine them without incorporating the knowledge we have gained since most composition/ literature courses were phased out, we will show that we have forgotten the reasons for which we did phase them out, and that we do not learn from the part of our discipline which is a science and not an art. Having taught in a composition/literature program that was wisely dismantled, and having listened to the arguments for and against comp/lit, I am convinced that there is a possibility that we will join them in an unenlightened reinvention. On the other hand, I am also convinced that with the benefit of new knowledge, the result of recent research, we can design and teach comp/lit courses more productively than before, though not necessarily more productively than alternative writing courses. Therefore, I would like to suggest three ways in which a reinvented comp/lit course can really be a writing course and can, at the same time, retain the benefits of literary exposure. These suggestions involve the framing of topics, the use of class time for writing activity, and the creation of a functioning sense of audience. Before I present these three suggestions, I would like to summarize several principles of teaching comp/lit offered by three teachers-Hart, Slack, and Woodruff-back in the fifties. These principles are the soundest I know from the days when comp/lit was thriving, and we will show progress by incorporating them into our reinvention. The comp/lit program that I helped dismantle would have been more successful and survivable if it had followed them. First, easy to say but hard to practice, the teacher must firmly resist the temptation to teach literature. The rationale for combining composition and literature is that they reinforce

When teach modern literature courses, tell students literature evolves through a process of growth through innovation. That is, innovators like Kafka or Woolf or Joyce probed boldly beyond the current state of literary art, extending frontiers and opening territory for writers who later worked their ways toward the new borders. Much this same process, think, is at the heart of the composition teaching enterprise. Researchers and theorists push beyond the state of the art as it is practiced in composition courses, allowing textbook authors, curriculum developers, and classroom teachers slowly to work their ways into new territory. Slowly is a key word in sentence. For as you know, a wide gap separates state-of-the-art theory and state-of-the-art practice in composition. Maxine Hairston illustrates this point/ in The Winds of Change (CCC, 33 [Feb. 1982]), when she gives an answer to people in our profession who say that the admonition to 'teach process, not product' is now conventional wisdom for which further argument is unnecessary. I disagree, Hairston writes:

(1983). Teaching the enthymeme: Invention and arrangement. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 38-50.

Articles by Richard Fulkerson, Karen Pelz, and Michael Hogan in the first issue of the Journal of Advanced Composition (Spring 1980) all pointed to a serious lack of consistency in the profession's conception of what should be covered in advanced composition courses in college. Professor Pelz, while arguing against what she perceives as another teacher's advocacy of media-centered rather than writing-centered advanced composition courses, advocates the development of a personal style in advanced writing courses, seemingly calling for an emphasis on expressive discourse and self-discovery (A Reply to Medicott: Evaluating Writing, 7-9). Professor Fulkerson (Some Theoretical Speculations on the Advanced Composition Curriculum, 9-12) uses Abrams' and Kinneavy's theories of literary criticism and the aims of discourse to construct two different curricular models for advanced composition programs--one suggesting courses based on the skills required of students as they produce discourse with different aims, the other suggesting synthesizing all four discourse aims in a single advanced composition course. Finally, Professor Hogan (Advanced Composition: A Survey, 21-29) sent questionnaires to 374 advanced composition teachers at 311 schools and found an enormously diverse range of course objectives and plans among the responses that he received. Hogan also found that many advanced composition courses used the same books as freshman writing courses in the same schools. Although rhetoric, Hogan found, dominated the courses of instruction, there did not seem to be any clear or consistent pattern of rhetorical approach in the schools or teachers who reported. Very few respondents, in fact, reflected much attention to types or aims of discourse, as Fulkerson had suggested, in their assignments or plans. Articles such as these reflect the composition profession's general lack