Reviewed are "Archives of Instruction: Nineteenth-Century Rhetorics, Readers, and Composition Books in the United States" by Jean Ferguson Carr, Stephen L. Carr, and Lucille M. Schultz; "The Knowledge Contract: Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace" by David B. Downing; and "Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres" by Hugh Blair, edited by Linda Ferreira-Buckley and Michael S. Halloran.

Published in the June 2005 issue, Richard Fulkerson’s “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century” brought comments from several readers. In the spirit of this free-wheeling discussion reminiscent of rather lengthy letters to the Editor, these appear as submitted, virtually all of their rambunctiousness intact (with the exception of customary yet spare copyediting). Following these is a response by Professor Fulkerson. If your own copy of the June 2005 issue isn’t handy, Fulkerson’s article can also be found on CCC Online (www.inventio.us/ccc).

This essay offers a historical explanation for the place of reader-response theory in English studies. Reader-response was a part of two movements: the (elitist) theory boom of the 1970s and the (populist) political movements of the 1960s and 1970s. If the theory boom was to remain elitist, it had to deauthorize reader-response. If reader-response was to remain populist, it had to consent to and participate in that deauthorization. In the 1980s reader-response was popular among compositionists, even as it began to lose currency among theorists. Later, however, compositionists professionalized themselves by deemphasizing, or even ignoring, reading. Now, as the profession again considers including explicit instruction in reading in the introductory writing course, the thinkers who could help us most have faded from the discussion.

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This essay was first presented at a CCCC panel whose project was to examine relations between literary studies and composition studies by focusing on what the organizers called an text. In a companion panel, representative voices from each institution spoke together about Cixous' Laugh of the Medusa, with its call for outrageous opposition to patriarchal institutions. Although we should be the first to say ceci n'est pas Cixous, we nonetheless use her text as a model; we mimic its outrageousness as we look at the institutions that constrain us as teachers of writing and put forth a modest proposal for changing them. We therefore take our charge literally. The institutional text on which we focus is not Professing Literature, Discipline and Punish, English in America or Politics of Letters. Rather, we look at the gradesheet. At the conclusion of each semester or quarter, every university prints a gradesheet on which its faculty is required to evaluate students' performances. Upon this institutional text our educational system might be said to rest. In his provocative book, Work Time: English Departments and the Circulation of Cultural Value, Evan Watkins puts the matter succinctly: in the context of work time, it matters less how you were taught Romantic poetry say-what socialization or countersocialization of expectations took place-than what grade you got at the end of the process.

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