Do more with less. Such is the austere mantra to which Nancy Welch and Tony Scott’s edited collection Composition in the Age of Austerity responds. Extending broad critiques of neoliberal higher ed...

First-year composition emerged at Harvard largely because of administrative attempts to address institutional, as opposed to pedagogical, issues. In particular, Harvard administrators sought to improve articulation with public high schools in order to increase enrollments, attract new populations of students, and retain matriculants. First-year composition provided a mechanism for doing so. Because of first-year composition’s value for articulation, it was endorsed by accreditation associations and consequently spread across the country as accreditation did. Articulation and accreditation were not expressly concerned with writing instruction, but they ultimately had profound effects on the development of writing instruction in American higher education.

2014 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Janice M. Lauer’s “Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline,” in which Lauer looks back to the field’s “pioneering efforts” at cobbling together a disciplinary identity—as she articulated, the field of rhetoric and composition’s most important questions “would have remained isolated and unexplored as they had been for decades if it were not for … a shared trait of these early theorists—their willingness to take risks, to go beyond the boundaries of their traditional training into foreign domains in search of starting points, theoretical launching pads from which to begin investigating these questions” (21). This interview reengages Lauer’s suggestion that the field’s early boundary-crossing transformed rhetoric and composition into a multifaceted and dappled discipline composed of a manifold of theoretical and onto-epistemological perspectives.

By exploring two perspectives on civility—the invitational and confrontational approaches—this article argues for revising the neoclassical model of rhetoric commonly found in introductory writing and speaking textbooks. This article further claims that a revised conception of civility—here termed “situated civility”—can help rhetors communicate ethically and practically about and across political, cultural, and personal differences.

The discipline of rhetoric and composition is experiencing a change in its core curricula as graduate programs are replacing a traditional set of core courses with a more customizable, elective plan of study that focuses on specializations. Graduate student dissertations predict the flow and direction of the field, determining curricular change. Programs are also being responsive to a trend in the listing of specialist positions in the MLA JIL. The 2000 and 2008 Rhetoric Review surveys of graduate curricula as well as the authors' most recent survey results reveal a change in values from general to more specialist curricula.

The discipline of rhetoric and composition is often defined by binaries: rhetoric/composition, teaching/practice. Our doctoral programs, however, occupy space at both ends of the spectrum through the simultaneous emphasis on composition pedagogy and rhetorical theory. The changing curricula in doctoral programs offer a unique lens through which to interpret some of the forces that have shaped rhetoric and composition as it has developed in the past fifty years. Examining the curricula highlights how our disciplinary identity has been shaped, at least in part, by our various institutional locations.

Abstract This essay identifies memoirs (obituaries) as the primary space women initially occupy in Methodist Magazine, the church's first successful periodical. Based on a study of 154 memoirs published in Methodist Magazine from 1818–25, this essay explores how memoirs operated as rhetorical composition intended to motivate and instruct the living as much as to elegize the dead. By exposing rhetorical strategies used in depictions of persons "dying well," specifically the roles assigned to women, this essay claims that women's memoirs transformed their deathbeds into pulpits, elevating them to ministers in death—positions they were precluded from holding in life. Notes 1I thank RR peer reviewers Vicki Tolar Burton and Jan Schuetz for their valuable feedback, and Kate Ronald, Sarah Robbins, and Connie Mick for helpful responses to drafts of this essay. 2Sarah Tomlinson's memoir was written by her sister. 3Gregory Schneider describes a dialectic of social religion with both iconic and instrumental moments (151). 4Collins's later publications appear under the name Vicki Tolar Burton. 5These calculations include those memoirs extracted from British periodicals. Going forward, I have limited my examination to memoirs written by and about American Methodists with the exception of two Canadians. In the Northeast some Methodist ministers' circuits crossed the border into Canada. 6It is important to note that authors and editors still controlled which extracts were included in memoirs; thus they could use these selections to construct individuals in certain ways. 7Methodists in good standing were invited to participate in quarterly, circuit-wide love feasts. These love feasts brought together all the congregants from the different churches on a minister's circuit to address business matters and share worship. During these gatherings members were encouraged to share their testimonies and discuss their spiritual failures and triumphs. Journals of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Vol. I, 1796–1836. New York: Carlton and Phillips, 1855. Methodist Magazine, (New York), 1818–1828. From American Periodical Series Online. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2000.

Though Plato may have been making a metaphysical argument when he valorized orality over textuality in Phaedrus, a close reading of “Plato's Pharmacy” reveals that Jacques Derrida's response, which reversed Plato's oral/textual dissociation, was metaphorical. The difference/differénce between the metaphysical and metaphorical is itself lost in the Yale School's translation of French deconstruction into American poststructuralism. When the Yale School's metaphysical interpretation of poststructuralism, and particularly the literary notion of the author, is imported into composition, Derrida's claim that writing is “essentially democratic” is itself reversed, and the student subject is deconstructed alongside student writing.

This essay discusses the emergence of whiteness studies in the study of English rhetoric and composition in the U.S. History of whiteness studies; Function and definition of whiteness in the U.S.; Role of race in different U.S. cultural logics; Relationship of whiteness studies with teaching composition.

In recent years a number of studies have limned the generic features of the instructor end comment on student texts. This study complements these large-scale analyses by examining from a rhetorical perspective two end comments, written by a first-year composition instructor, and by evaluating how the comments reflect and resist elements of two schemes that classify teacher response.

Robert Scholes. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Pp. Xiv + 203. Sharon Crowley. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1998. Xi + 306 pages. W. Ross Winterowd. The English Department: A Personal and Institutional History. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998. Xii + 261. Molly Meijer Wertheimer, ed. Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. 408 pages. $47.50 cloth; $24.95 paper. Mary Lynch Kennedy, ed. Theorizing Composition: A Critical Sourcebook of Theory and Scholarship in Contemporary Composition Studies. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1998. 405 pages. John Schilb. Between the Lines: Relating Composition Theory and Literary Theory. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1996. Xv + 247. Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald. Reason to Believe: Romanticism, Pragmatism, and The Teaching of Writing. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 1998. xiv + 187 pages. Thomas Newkirk. The Performance of Self in Student Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 1997. xiii + 107 pages. Kay Halasek. A Pedagogy of Possibility: Bakhtinian Perspectives on Composition Studies. Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. 223 pages.

Since classical times, rhetorical education has been concerned with training in the civic functions of discourse-with young people to talk about public issues responsibly and articulately. And unsurprisingly, those who study and teach rhetoric have often faced public scrutiny and have been compelled to defend their pedagogical and philosophical views. One current battle over the public function of rhetorical education centers on the politically charged writing pedagogies that emerged in our discipline during the early 1990s. These approaches, commonly dubbed radical teaching or teaching, and whose most prominent advocates include James Berlin (Rhetoric), Patricia Bizzell (Academic), Susan Jarratt (Feminism), and Mary Louise Pratt (Arts), reject the notion that college writing courses should be ideologically neutral spaces dedicated to nurturing students' individual expression. Rather, these scholars hold, rhetorical instruction should prepare to deal critically with the arguments they encounter in the dominant culture and empower them to produce texts that resist those values. And thus, they argue, writing instructors have an obligation to cultivate in an appreciation for progressive political values, a sensitivity to injustice, and an ability to debate divisive issues-skills best developed through confrontational classroom exchanges. The range of practices these scholars advocate includes asking to engage with texts written from perspectives vastly different from their own (Bizzell, Academic 283-84), to debate heated questions in class (Jarratt 118-19), and to adopt a critical stanceoften the teacher's own-toward mainstream ideologies (Berlin, Rhetoric 3637). Yet despite its lofty goals, critical has faced criticism on multiple grounds. Opponents like Maxine Hairston decry the very goals of such pedagogy, charging that it puts dogma before diversity, politics before craft, ideology before critical thinking, and the social goals of the teacher before the educational needs of the students (Diversity 180). More recently, Stephen

Recent discussions of teaching composition in the context of cultural studies have begun consider the condition of the writing subject in society, yet these discussions construct student-writer Subjects according modernist identity/difference binary oppositions that are politically problematic.1 The modernist Subject is defined in terms of its objective relationship reality and its opposition Other subjects, and the construction of the modernist Subject (autonomous and sovereign) is an effect of ethno-centric formulations (frames, constructions) of identity/difference oppositions.2 In Orientalism, for example, Edward Said describes how modernist European societies construct cultural differences not only as but also as opposite (the of the West is constructed in opposition the of the East). According Said, When one uses categories like Oriental and Western as both the starting and the end points of analysis, research, public policy, . . . the result is usually polarize the distinction-the Oriental becomes more Oriental, the Westerner more Western-and limit the human encounter between different cultures, traditions, and societies. The tendency, then, is to channel thought into a West or an East compartment (46), eliminating the possibility for common ground, agreement, understanding, or in more extreme cases, destroying the human capacity for tolerance of We cannot maintain oppositional notions of identity/difference without inevitably falling into a situation in which gains (or attempts gain) hegemonic control over difference. A few recent cultural theorists, on the other hand, do not view and as oppositional terms; instead, they construct identity and difference as a complementary pair, as an alliance rather than an opposition. And the subjectivities that result from this alliance refuse the structural closure of the modernist Subject and articulate themselves (engage in cultural and rhetorical practices) in the aporia between and Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida in particular deconstruct the unified structure of the sovereign and autonomous modernist Subject, positing in its place a space in the aporia between and where subjectivities construct themselves and each other. Throughout much of his work, Foucault is concerned with issues of and in the textual construction of subjectivities. Discursive

Last summer, I wrote a letter to editor of my local newspaper and coauthored a response to George Will's now-infamous assault on college writing instructional Big deal? Yes. And here's why: Like many composition instructors, I've been preoccupied for some time with what S. Michael Halloran once called the need for a revival of public discourse (246) and what 1995 Conference on College Composition and Communication called literacies, technologies, responsibilities. My response to these preoccupations has always been passive: I figured that I could best promote responsible practice of public literacies by enhancing my students' awareness of-and thus, I thought, their stake in-public issues. Unsure of whether I was actually accomplishing this, though, I decided to investigate whether there were indeed connections between students' classroom-initiated participation in literate behavior (e.g., writing, reading, and talking about issues) and their self-initiated participation in civic behavior, such as voting and writing letters to editor. To do so, I looked closely at several current issues-type writing textbooks and selected one that appeared to share my goals; I designed an attitudinal survey and a sequence of assignments; and I assembled a file of student writing samples. I'll discuss results of my study in more detail later in this essay, but for now, let me suggest that writing-about-issues texts that I examined (including America Now, one I eventually chose) do not particularly encourage students' participation in world beyond classroom, and may unwittingly repress it. And while this came as a great surprise to me, my students seemed aware of profound difference between writing about issues in class and acting on them (in writing or otherwise) outside of class. For example, in response to some end-of-semester assessment questions about America Now, one young woman, Laura G., wrote, Well, I'm not going to go join [G]reenpeace or storm White House or anything but, yes, reading some of these chapters really did [a]ffect my thinking. . . . Reading these articles caused me to speak out at times when I would have normally remained silent. I don't want to underestimate move from silence to speaking out, but I

In Challenge of Diversity, H. Roy Kaplan, executive director of The National Conference of Christians and Jews, writes, Our obsession with or fear of differences has become a morbid fetish that threatens to tear our moral fabric apart (8). The article appeared in a weekly newspaper that covers arts, entertainment, and public issues in and around Tampa Bay area. The newspaper is also read-with varying degrees of attention-I discovered, by about two-thirds of my first-year composition students at University of South Florida. Although well intentioned, piece answers the of with a kind of laissez-faire pluralism: We must create an environment where people, all people, feel needed and wanted-part of a of caring and sharing human beings; where diversity, pluralism and differences are valued for richness and value they bring to human experiences (8). My students' offerings on cultural diversity and race relations bear striking resemblances to Kaplan's sentiment. At institutions with culturally diverse populations like South Florida, students often find it convenient and reassuring to believe in promise of a harmonious pluralism. Like Kaplan, many students believe that it is focus on and preoccupation with gender, racial, and class differences that is actually problem and not social and political dimensions of these differences. Certainly, in order to work for livable futures and in order to interrogate asymmetrical power formations in multicultural societies, we should envision difference as an asset and not a liability. However, we cannot create livable futures by simply ignoring real frictions and tensions created by unequal access to power and benefits of dominant culture. The answer to challenge of is not to imagine a community of caring and sharing human beings but to recognize our multicultural society as a tense plurality, as Joseph Harris says, and learn how to generate productive dialogue from tensions of difference. As evidenced above, students do not come to class ignorant of tensions

Composition's recent turn toward cultural studies a research methodology and a pedagogy grows out of an interest in imagining the democratic potentials of rhetoric.1 James Berlin had been one of the compositionists at the forefront of theorizing composition's uses of cultural studies. In Poststructuralism, Cultural Studies, and the Composition Classroom, for example, Berlin laid out the project of a cultural studies pedagogy, stating that must come to see that the languages they are expected to speak, write, and embrace ways of thinking and acting are never disinterested, always bringing with them strictures on the existent, the good, the possible, and regimes of power (24). Yet the roadblocks to such a project in composition in particular and cultural studies in general are that recognitions of the of language can also narrow the possibilities for transformative critical engagements. In the extreme, recognizing the structural interestedness of language, its claims on who we are and what we can do, generates only resignation and indifference. As Lester Faigley writes, the profound cynicism of many students concerning public responsibilities suggests to some the possibility that as society is increasingly saturated with ever expanding quantities of information, objects, and services, the space for the autonomous subject with a capacity for critical thought collapses (213). problem confronting compositionists working with cultural studies today is thus one of actualizing democratic opportunities anticipated in the critical study of cultural sign systems. What opportunities does cultural studies provide compositionists for critically reimagining their pedagogical and research responses to the interestedness of language practices? Our response is to say that cultural studies can offer critical redirections of the ideological motivations for contemporary rhetorics when it conceptualizes those rhetorics in terms of their civic settings. Berlin had already noted the significance of place to rhetoric in an earlier article on the historiography of rhetoric, where he remarked: The ability to read, write, and speak in accordance with the code sanctioned by a culture's ruling class is the main work of education, and this is true whether we are discussing ancient Athens or modern Detroit (52). What is most interesting for our purposes about Berlin's quotation is that he suggests

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.

(1995). Pestalozzi's Mark on nineteenth‐century composition instruction: Ideas not in words, but in things. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 23-43.

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

Except for the essay and the research paper, perhaps no component of the college composition course is as prevalent as the personal journal, and in recent years the journal has become a principal export in the Writing-Across-the-Curriculum movement. Most composition textbooks contain a section on journal-keeping, and several, such as Christopher C. Burnham's Writingfrom the Inside Out, place the journal at the heart of the writing course. The journal is often associated with what James Berlin has called the Subjective approach to composition instruction, which assumes that insights arising from within the writer are of paramount importance, that reality is a personal and private construct (145). But the journal has proven versatile enough to fit almost any pedagogical model. Textbooks and instructor's guides commonly list a number of functions for the journal: creative stimulant, idea repository, experimental forum, and learning tool. The multidisciplinary essays in Toby Fulwiler's The Journal Book show its protean manifestations, including dialogue journal, learning log, team journal, math record, and office log. Theoretically, we place considerable faith in the journal and what it represents for our students-an opportunity to take control of their writing and to engage in independent inquiry. Yet many instructors who initially sense the potential of this genre give up on it when it leads to disappointing results.

(1990). Cultural literacy, curricular reform, and freshman composition. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 270-278.

The freshman composition course is a peculiarly American institution not shared by modern British or European universities. This study grew out of an attempt to understand why rhetoric fell from favor in the British universities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and why composition, as an course, failed to develop. It is the purpose of this study to examine writing instruction in the British universities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to understand such developments.2 Writing instruction within any society is subject to social and political influences, and nowhere is this more true than in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Britain, that territory that encompassed England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In addition, strong religious movements and a special linguistic situation during this period shaped where and how writing was taught. The eighteenth century in Britain was a period of transition as the agricultural population migrated to the cities in large numbers. Industrialization was rapid. Between 1700 and 1800, England saw the rise of the industrial centers of Manchester and Liverpool, while Scotland changed from a poor agricultural society to a relatively industrialized one with an increase in population from 84,000 to 500,000 during the nineteenth century. Preparatory schools and universities were not available or adequate. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, England had two universities, Oxford and Cambridge. Although Scotland had four well-established universities, Ireland had one, and Wales none. The eighteenth century was also a period of upward mobility, and good English became a rung on the ladder. With economic stability established, the large and powerful merchant class and those aspiring to better themselves saw education in general, and language in particular, as one of the ways to move up. In response, the school teachers and grammarians, with a strong belief in rationality and rules, set out to standardize the language, firm in the beliefs that change was a sign of deterioration and that Latin was the standard by which all languages should be measured. During the period there was also a rise in nationalism, which resulted in a new reverence for language and literature. Although men and

Edward M. White, Developing Successful College Writing Programs. Foreword by Richard Lloyd‐Jones. San Francisco: Jossey‐Bass, 1989. xxii + 232 pages. Louise Wetherbee Phelps, Composition as a Human Science: Contributions to the Self‐Understanding of a Discipline. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. xiii + 268 pages. Louise Z. Smith, ed., Audits of Meaning: A Festschrift in Honor of Ann E. Berthoff. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, Heinemann, 1988. Foreword by Paulo Freire. xv + 264 pages. Jasper Neel, Plato, Derrlda, and Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. 252 pages. Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric. Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1988. xi + 508 pages.

Since the mid 1960s, empirical approaches to scholarship in rhetoric and composition have emerged.' The use of empirical approaches can be seen in much of the work of scholars who study reading, writing, and literacy, their interconnections, and their relation to thinking and learning. Given the relative high profile of empirical approaches over the last three decades, most people in rhetoric and composition have some understanding of their nature. However, given the rise of recent challenges (Berlin; Irmscher; North), it seems important to begin a discussion about the assumptions that inform empirical inquiry. This paper is aimed at initiating such a discussion, and, in particular, it is concerned with characterizing theory building in empirical scholarship and research within the context of humanistic inquiry. In this way, I hope to show that empirical practices in rhetoric and composition can be important for provoking better rhetorics of inquiry (Nelson 430). Empirical scholarship and research in rhetoric and composition grow out of a tacit assumption that knowledge in our field is probabilistic and contextual. In its broadest sense, empirically based theory building is aimed at understanding and evaluating existing knowledge and at generating new knowledge about language-using in society. Empirical inquiry in rhetoric and composition is a humanistic activity that is built on the premise of the epistemic, dialectical, and generative nature of our knowledge. (See Scott's corpus for a sustained discussion of rhetoric as epistemic.) As with other kinds of knowledge-making, empirical knowledge is a product of a dialectic which takes place among a speaker, an interpretive community or social group in which the speaker is trying to contribute, and the historical, political, material, ideological, and situational context in which the speaker is working. For example, say that one is interested in exploring the role of sophistic rhetoric on Greek and Roman thinking through case histories of early

In the century or so that required freshman composition courses have been in existence, critics have often called for their abolition. Indeed, no other subject of study in the university has been so persistently and bitterly attacked, as historians have often noted (Berlin, Rhetoric; Greenbaum; Parker). I cannot in this space recount the whole history of the attempts to abolish composition courses. Instead I will analyze the arguments that the abolitionists used to attack the courses, and in doing so explore the assumptions which lay behind their opposition-assumptions which continue to fuel the conflicts within English studies: between teachers of literature and of literacy, between exponents of competing theories of the composing process, and, finally, between those who favor and those who oppose wider access to the academic community. Though English departments were founded at the close of the nineteenth century largely to teach writing, and freshman composition has been the most constant part of a shifting elective curriculum ever since, composition courses have rarely been a full part of the university. Dismissed as remedial or preparatory, condemned as ineffective, passed down like old clothes to

(1987). Creating a literate environment in Freshman English: Why and how. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 4-20.

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

Advanced composition is now taught in colleges throughout the country to students in a variety of majors. But, unlike freshman English where one finds similar curricula and texts, this course has not had a traditional structure. In some schools, it may even indicate technical writing or advanced grammar study. In a 1979 survey, Michael Hogan discovered that at most colleges the course extended fundamentals learned in freshman English, with work on style and organization for argument, exposition, and other essay forms. Because few specialized texts were then available, teachers relied on books intended for freshmen, such as Hall's Writing Well and The Norton Reader, and thus repeated familiar advice on the modes of exposition, paragraphing and usage, with little attention given to research on composition.1

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