What's becoming of the history of composition? In previous decades we generally spoke in terms of “rhetoric and composition,” with “composition” understood to be about the teaching of writing. Hist...

What's not to trust? This commonplace rejoinder to an expression of skepticism is the sort of rhetorical question that is at issue in Susan Miller's latest book. She prefaces her study by questioni...

Reviewed are The Selected Essays of Robert J. Connors,edited by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford; Writing in the Academic Disciplines: A Curricular History, by David R. Russell; Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States, by Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen; and Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910, by Nan Johnson.

Abstract To assess how rhetoric is positioned in English and communications programs, I review surveys of undergraduate majors, including my own survey of a stratified sample of one hundred four‐year institutions. I also analyze the statements of purposes from varied departments. While discussions of rhetorical studies tend to be defined in terms of departmentalized disciplines, the relations between fields such as English and communications vary by types of institutions, with joint programs more common in smaller colleges and rhetoric and composition courses more pervasive in public institutions. Such situational factors need to be assessed in order to develop a more rhetorical stance on the collaborative capacities of rhetorical studies in English and communications. The pragmatics of the two disciplines differ in ways worth noting if rhetoricians in the two fields are to collaborate more productively.

(2001). Making Use of the Nineteenth Century: The Writings of Robert Connors and Recent Histories of Rhetoric and Composition. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 20, No. 1-2, pp. 147-157.

Contextualizes the rhetorical archive and moves beyond composition to the traditions of civic discourse, classical rhetorical theory, and moral philosophy. Wonders what kind of archive of actual historical practices would enable rhetoricians to confirm or qualify the existence of a genuine tradition of civic discourse.

Robert Scholes. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Pp. Xiv + 203. Sharon Crowley. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1998. Xi + 306 pages. W. Ross Winterowd. The English Department: A Personal and Institutional History. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998. Xii + 261. Molly Meijer Wertheimer, ed. Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. 408 pages. $47.50 cloth; $24.95 paper. Mary Lynch Kennedy, ed. Theorizing Composition: A Critical Sourcebook of Theory and Scholarship in Contemporary Composition Studies. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1998. 405 pages. John Schilb. Between the Lines: Relating Composition Theory and Literary Theory. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1996. Xv + 247. Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald. Reason to Believe: Romanticism, Pragmatism, and The Teaching of Writing. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 1998. xiv + 187 pages. Thomas Newkirk. The Performance of Self in Student Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 1997. xiii + 107 pages. Kay Halasek. A Pedagogy of Possibility: Bakhtinian Perspectives on Composition Studies. Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. 223 pages.

Jacqueline de Romilly. The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Oxford University Press, 1992. 260 pages. $75.00. Ira Shor. Empowering Education. University of Chicago Press, 1992.286 + vii pages. Lester Faigley. Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 1992. 285 pages. Crowley, Sharon. The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current‐Traditional Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. xviii + 207 pages. Horner, Winifred Bryan. Nineteenth‐Century Scottish Rhetoric: The American Connection. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. x + 211 pages. Johnson, Nan. Nineteenth‐Century Rhetoric in North America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.313 pages. Rewriting the nineteenth century Chris M. Anson, Joan Graham, David A. Jolliffe, Nancy S. Shapiro, Carolyn H. Smith. Scenarios for Teaching Writing: Contexts for Discussion and Reflective Practice. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1993. xiii + 160 pages. Mark Backman, Sophistication: Rhetoric and the Rise of Self‐Consciousness. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1991. Douglas Walton. The Place of Emotion in Argument. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. 294 pages. $45.00 cloth, $14.95 paper.

Classical practitioners of the art of rhetoric such as Demosthenes have long been a familiar part of the rhetorical tradition, but subsequent periods have generally been confined to the history of rhetorical theory, with little attention paid to political rhetoric or public discourse. We need to develop a more rhetorical perspective on the history of rhetoric to encompass rhetoric's dual nature as an intellectual discipline and a practical political art. Such a perspective would focus on the domain between the learned culture and the public experience, the domain where rhetorical theories are applied to discursive practices to formalize who can speak, how controversial issues are to be argued, and what political purposes such arguments serve. The eighteenth century is a dynamic period in the history of rhetoric precisely because the domain between the educated world and the public sphere was transformed by the expansion of the reading public.' Rhetoricians such as Hugh Blair were the first professors to lecture on modern culture because they taught students who came from the provinces of the English reading public.2 General histories of college English studies tend to ignore eighteenth-century rhetoricians in the assumption that the study of English is more or less synonymous with the study of literature (see Baldick, Graff, McMurty, and Palmer).3 We need more rhetorically oriented histories of modem cultural studies, not just because literature specialists have tacitly accepted the erasure of rhetoric from such studies, but also because the formation of disciplinary knowledge is a rhetorical process, and the domain of rhetoric is where disciplines set themselves off from related discourses and public audiences. Rhetoricians first introduced English into the university curriculum in the middle of the eighteenth century in Scotland, America, and elsewhere in the cultural provinces. All of the figures whom Howell has categorized as New rhetoricians came from outside the centers of English education, while Oxford and Cambridge

Richard Leo Enos, The Literate Mode of Cicero's Legal Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. xii + 127 pages. George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. Ixxvi + 415 pages. Jasper Neel, Plato, Derrida, and Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. 252 pages. William A. Covino, The Art of Wondering: A Revisionist Return to the History of Rhetoric. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook; Heinemann, I988. 141 pages. Bruce A: Kimball, Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education. Foreword by Joseph L. Featherstone. Columbia University: Teachers College Press, 1986. 293 pages. Jean‐François Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Foreword by Frederick Jameson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. 110 pages.