Some scholars trace the start of writing across the curriculum to the 1970s. However, in 1929, when appointed president of the National Council of Teachers of English, Ruth Mary Weeks initiated A Correlated Curriculum (1936), a significant interdisciplinary project that specifically viewed English as the mechanism for achieving an integrated curriculum. Although her goal was not fully realized, Weeks's efforts are important in their attempts to open education to broader classes of students, to promote learning as a collaborative process, to prepare all students to meet the demands of transforming social and industrial circumstances, and, ultimately, to restructure industrial America.

While disciplinary histories have traced the origins of professionalized literary study, little attention has been paid to the development of specialized rhetorical conventions in this field. This rhetorical analysis of the first publication of the MLA, Transactions of the Modern Language Association of America 1884–5, draws on "writing in the disciplines" research to categorize the stases, topoi, and sentence subject conventions developing in this publication. This analysis clarifies the longstanding and entrenched nature of some current conventions of literary scholarship despite the profound changes in the object of study this field has undertaken.

In this article I intend to share my experiences of teaching writingintensive courses at a large state university with the use of computers.' I want to present my positive experiences to the reader in such a way that will make you want to join me in exploring the myriad of possibilities of teaching with technology: ways that will free us, not constrict us-ways that will enhance learning and dialogue, not provide new ways of shutting down the inquisitive minds of students, but rather of expanding and enhancing all their possibilities and ours. Let me explain at the outset that the technologies I am advocating for teaching writing in writing-intensive literature and folklore courses are largely electronic mail formats and web sites for the distribution of assignments, for syllabi, for student writing, written assignments and peer reviews, and for the position of hypertext archives for class listservs.2 E-mail discussion listserv formats provide an easy way for everyone in the class to communicate automatically with every other member of the class, as well as with the instructor(s).3 Teachers, teaching assistants, tutors, and students can all be subscribed to the discussion listserv; whenever anyone on the list posts a memo addressed to the listserv, all persons subscribed to the list receive a copy of the entry. The listserv owner (generally, the teacher) controls who can be subscribed to the discussion list and who can participate in this electronic forum and how the discussion will operate. For example, in my descriptions below, I will illustrate how every student journal entry or writing assignment goes automatically to the computers of all the other students and myself. However, when I wish to communicate privately with a student or send her or him a graded paper, I can send that message only to that particular student simply by addressing the note to the individual student rather than to the entire list; similarly, when students are doing peer reviews of other students' papers, for privacy, they can post their comments only to the author of a paper, rather than to the entire class. In this paper I am advocating the use of the e-mail discussion list format because I believe in its capacity to better enable students to write well