At a time when the study of composition seems especially prone to excess and imbalanceheading toward what could be a tyrannizing theoretical orderhere is a call back to the center, to the concreteness of the teaching moment itself.In a festschrift to honor William F. Irmscher, director for twenty-three years of the University of Washington composition program, the editors outline the need for a among theories and between theory and teaching. This balancing act is a tribute to Irmscher, who counseled compromise and the resolution of conflicting viewpoints. Irmscher could reconcile new ideas with the practical struggles of student writers and composition teachers. As a theorist, Irmscher was one of the first to bring theoretical rigor to composition studies, yet he always strove to express the issueshowever complexin clear and fluid language.The two parts of the text invoke the balancing act between the concerns of the students and the concerns of the teachers. The first part, Identity and Community, presents six essays about helping students explore their identities as writers and the effectiveness of those identities within communities of writers. The second part, Intuition and Institution, includes five essays focusing on the dynamics of teachers decision making about theory and pedagogy within their own institutional communities. The last chapter examines Irmscher s life and writings.This celebration of William F. Irmscher is a celebration of the complexity and the humanness of the act of composing and of the student writers themselves, who are at the heart of this whole enterprise.

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.

In a challenging essay on Emerson as an essayist, William Gass complains about all the his colleagues are writing, those awful objects full of footnotes and scholarly defenses. He wishes that more of us would turn to writing again-informal, experimental, open-ended, personal pieces, like Emerson's (25). No one would dispute, I think, that the article in Gass' sense dominates the scholarly journals. To get something published anymore we need to pretend that everything is clear, that our arguments are unassailable, that there are no soggy patches, no illicit inferences, no illegitimate connections (Gass 25), and that means submitting articles rather than essays. Why is that? Why has the essay as a form declined in the academic world, even as has gained in popularity outside the academic world? As Joseph Epstein has recently said in his own essay about the essay, it is a sweet time to be an essayist; the essay is taking up the slack for the novel (411). Why is that true outside of academe when the opposite is the case inside? Chesterton gives us one perspective on these questions in the opening paragraphs of his autobiography, a book, like all of Chesterton's books, which is nothing more than a long, associative set of essays. Chesterton is a quintessential essayist, quick to write and generalize, informal yet detached, always playing over the field of his own immediate experience and reading. In these opening paragraphs of the autobiography, he quickly claims the ground that I think all essays claim when he admits that he has no first-hand knowledge of his own birth and the circumstances of his early childhood and so must accept on faith the evidence of his existence: Of course what many call hearsay evidence, or what I call human evidence, might be questioned in theory, as in the Baconian controversy or a good deal of Higher Criticism. It is possible, by employing the skeptical methods of contemporary philosophy and criticism, to argue that he was never born at all. He cannot prove that he was. But I prefer Chris Anderson is assistant professor of English and Composition Coordinator at Oregon State University. His book, Style as Argument: Contemporary American Nonfiction, was published last year by Southern Illinois University Press, and he has edited and contributed to another book for Southern Illinois, Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy, to be published this fall.

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