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.

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