A Polemical History of Freshman Composition in Our Time

College English Dec 1986

A Polemical History of Freshman Composition in Our Time

Dwight Purdy

Abstract

I am coming on my twentieth year of teaching composition to college freshmen, and my fifteenth administering a composition program. These anniversaries incite me to think about the circles we who teach writing have perambulated in that time-to count the ways we have, for worse and better, changed how we shape composition programs, how we manage those programs, and how we teach the courses in them. From the fifties through my days as a student and then as a new teacher, rhetoric-meaning the analysis and presentation of arguments-dominated college composition programs. But at many colleges then, the English requirement included a literature survey, and composition programs often and awkwardly stirred rhetoric and literature in one pot. For example, research papers were on literary topics, an approach that encouraged publishers to produce hundreds of excellent casebooks, all recycled long ago. The rhetorical lion and literary lamb did not get on amicably, however. They tussled. The lamb often turned wolfish. The experiential programs of the early seventies-with their emphasis on narration and description, on journal writing, on films and visual arts as aids to invention-were a victory for the literateurs, and their last hour. For then came graduate programs in composition, and the gospel of process was heard in the land. Rhetoric-now meaning heuristic strategies-ascended. Literature became, and has remained, a negligible part of most composition programs. And today, as the slogan Writing Across the Curriculum is blazoned on textbook covers and eagerly mouthed by deans who see a way to save a buck, literaturemeaning the study of fiction, drama, and perhaps even (though that's radical) poetry for their own sweet sakes-dwindles to a thin shade in freshman writing

Journal: College English
Published: 1986-12-01
DOI: 10.2307/376724
Open Access: Closed
Topics: first-year composition