Over the past thirty years, has flowered as a discipline in the academy. Doctoral programs in abound, and its position in the pantheon of academic fields seems assured. There is plenty of work in composition. But what is the nature of that work now, and what should it be? James Slevin asks such probing, primary questions in Introducing English, an overdue assessment of the state of by one of its most respected practitioners. Too often, Slevin claims, representations of take the form of promoting the field and its specialists, rather than explaining the fundamental work of and its important consequences. In thirteen thematically and methodologically linked essays, Slevin argues toward a view of the discipline as a set of activities, not as an enclosed field of knowledge. Such a view broadens the meaning of the work of to include teaching and learning, a two-way process, creating alliances across conventional educational boundaries, even beyond educational institutions. Slevin traces how emerged for him not as a vehicle for improving student writing, but rather as a way of working collaboratively with students to interpret educational practices and work for educational reform. He demonstrates the kind of classroom practice - in reading accounts of the Anglicization of Pocahontas - that reveals the social and cultural consequences of language and language education. For good or ill, writes Slevin, composition has always been at the center of the reproduction of social inequality, or of the resistance to that process. He asks those in the discipline to consider such history in the reading and writing they ask students to do and the reasons they give for asking them to do it. A much-anthologized essay by E. B. White from The New Yorker is the site for an examination of genre as social institution, introducing the ways in which the discourses of the academy can be understood as both obstacle and opportunity. Ultimately, Introducing English is concerned with the importance of writing and the teaching of writing to the core values of higher education. Composition is always a metonym for something else Slevin concludes. Usually, it has figured the impossibility of the student body - their lacks that require supplement, their ill-health that requires remedy. Introducing English introduces a new figure - a two-way process of inquiry - that better serves the intellectual culture of the university. Chapters on writing across the curriculum, university management, and faculty assessment (the tenure system) put this new model to practical, innovative use. Introducing English will be necessary reading for all those who work with composition, as well as those engaged in learning theory, critical theory, and education reform.

Explores the place of faculty and faculty values in the process of assessing the work of higher education. Searches to find better ways to put the intellectual work of faculty and students at the center of the educational concerns and at the center of assessment models. Suggests that faculty should devote themselves to teaching the first-year course.

he call for improved educational assessment, and specifically the assessment of writing programs, has become louder and more urgent in the past decade. I want here to explore the place of faculty and faculty values in the process of assessing the work of higher education. How can we find better ways to put the intellectual work of faculty and students at the center of our educational concerns and, as a consequence, at the center of assessment models? A focus on first-year writing courses seems to me to be especially fruitful in responding to these questions. A university education is the work faculty and students do together, work pursued closely and undertaken carefully over time. This being the case, the first-year writing course (often the only course required of all students at a college or university) can clarify in crucial ways the primary place of intellectual work-of study and thought-in our understanding of the meaning and purposes of the university. Such a clarification can thereby help to resist the commodification of education and the corporatization of its institutions. As I have argued elsewhere,1 the first-year course should not be foundational to but rather be organic with the rest of the curriculum; it should not ground but enact the intellectual work of the university; it should not anticipate but begin the students' education. Language that conceptualizes the first-year course in terms of foundation, preparation, and anticipation narrativizes and scaffolds this course in order to empty it out: the meaning of the course is elsewhere. Its outcomes, not its work, give it its value.

(1987). The status of composition faculty: Resolving reforms. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 190-193.

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The future of the English department and the among its various parts are much-debated issues, with special attention now given (as it will be here) to the problem of connecting literature and composition. If English departments have a future (besides the one we are often asked to go back to), will that future combine or separate lit and comp? There are among us many who propose or announce the death of the English department altogether; indeed, one often finds its obituary in the more exciting journals. Others, given to slightly less drastic cures, argue for the separation (amputation?) of composition from literature, with composition forming an independent department. A more difficult problem faces us when we presume that English departments will continue to exist, that composition should be a part of them, and that literature and composition can and should cooperate in some way, not go about their work independently. I want to explore the possibilities of such cooperation, focusing on the key terms, the figurative devices, and to some extent the genres we use in formulating our visions of a connected English Studies. I should say right off that I will be looking closely at our rhetoric of connections for my own rhetorical reasons. I will be arguing for an antifederalist view of such a union, a Jeffersonian and not Hamiltonian notion of the English department and the profession. Like Jefferson, I think that certain ways of defining the union can be tyrannical, that some disconnections can be constitutionally healthy, and that in every generation we must be prepared, indeed eager, to rethink and rearrange our relationships. In this generation, there is certainly much to arrange and rearrange. Just a random sample from what I assure you were entirely unsolicited brochures sent