I’m going to try a new format for doing my notes. I like the predictable pattern of Collin’s suggested notetaking method, but I didn’t feel like his categories fit the way I think about my notes. I’m going to now try a synthesis of Dianna’s abstracting (that she showed us in Louise’s class) and some of Collin’s categories. Here it goes:
Sue Ellen Holbrook. “Women’s Work: The Feminizing of Composition.” Rhetoric Review 9.2 (1991): 201-229.
Holbrook argues that women and the field of composition have a parallel, unappreciated, and undervalued status in the modern academy. She cites that even within the field of composition and rhetoric, women are underrepresented in the scholarly journals and in more senior academic and administrative roles, such as writing program administrators or full, tenured professors. She has numerous tables in her appendices, including charts that show which professions are comprised by a majority of men or women, tables that show the wage discrepencies between male and female professors, and tables that show the percentage of women who write certain types of books in the field of rhetoric and composition (i.e. basic writing texts, workbooks, theory, etc.) Composition and rhetoric is a female-dominated field, but even still, it is being largely shaped on the disciplinary level by men. This discrepency needs to be addressed in order for women to achieve social and economic equality in the field and the academy.
Quotes:
“Saturated by women practitioners, focused on pedagogy, allied wiht education departments and school teaching, conceived as having a “service” and elentary place in the curriculum, and pervaded by paraprofessionalism, composition has become women’s work. And so it will remain – disproportionaltely the work of women and work of lesser value – as long as these conditions remain.” (211)
Top 5
Hartzog, Carol P. “Composition and the Academy: A Preliminary Report on AAU Writing Programs.” ADE Bulletin (Spring 1986), 49-52.
Hewlett, Sylvia Ann. A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women’s Liberation in America. New York: William Morrow, 1986.
Hummer, Patricia M. The Decade of Elusive Promise: Professional Women in the United States, 1920-1930. UMI Research P, 1976.
Morlock, Laura. “Discipline Variation in the Status of Academic Women.” Academic Women on the Move. Ed. Alice S. Rossi and Ann Calderwood. New York: Russell Sage, 1973. 255-312.
Weaver, Barbara. “Bibliography of Writing Textbooks.” WPA: Writing Program Administration 9 (Spring 1986): n.pag.
Jacqueline Jones Royster and Jean C. Williams. “History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies.” CCC 50.4 (1999): 563-584.
Royster and Williams claim that African-Americans have been pigeon holed in the field of composition and rhetoric and therefore, African American students and scholars are misrepresented, their problems and needs are generalized, and their scholarship and pedagogy go ignored. They blame the primacy of the published histories of rhetoric and composition (Berlin, Brereton, Kitzhauer, etc.) for perpetuating this marginalization, pointing out that because these texts were published first, they form a sort of accepted canon in the field, making perspectives not discussed in them (such as African-American rhetorics) the “other.” They challenge scholars to look for rhetorical practices both in the places that these first historians of the field have shed light on and the other, perhaps more non-traditional places that were cast into the shadows by these authors.
Quotes:
“‘Official’ narratives set the agenda for how and whether other narratives can operate with consequence, and they also set hte measures of universality – that is, the terms by which we assign generality, validity, reliability, credibility, significance, authority, and so forth.” (580)
“These same narratives have simultaneously directed our analytical gaze selectively, casting, therefore, both light and shadow across the historical terrain.” (581)
“We can ask, instead, basic questions, such as: For whom is this claim true? For whom is it not true? What else is happening? What are the operational conditions? In the interest of the larger enterprises of knowledge making and public policy making, we are encouraged by such strategies to resist primacy and to operate in a more generative and less offensive manner.” (581)
“Composition histories show that when we consistently ignore, peripheralize, or reference rather than address non-officialized experiences, inadequate images continue to prevail and actually become increasingly resilient in supporting the mythologies and negative consequences for African American students and faculty.” (582)
Question:
How will focused attention on the work of African-American composition scholars and rhetoricians help African-American university students?
Top Five
Berlin, James A. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.
Cook, William. “Writing in the Spaces Left.” CCC 44 (1993): 9-25.
Fontaine, Sheryl, and Susan Hunter, eds. Writing Ourselves into the Story: Unheard Voices from Composition Studies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993.
Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern University UP, 1991.
Shaughnessy, Mina P. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.
Goggin, Maureen Daly. “Composing a Discipline: The Role of Scholarly Journals in the Disciplinary Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition” Rhetoric Review 15.2 (Spring 1997): 322-349
Goggin traces the history of the field of rhetoric and composition through the establishment of the major journals in the field and the conversations taking place in those publications. She notes three major “eras” in the half-century history of the discipline: the formation of the field with the first CCCC and the creation of CCC in 1950, the expansion of the field as it reached out to other disciplines and asked larger, more theoretical questions from 1965 to the 1980s, and the calls for the unification of the field from the 1980s on. Goggin points out that such discilplinary unification is impossible and unnecessary, as other fields are equally as diverse. However, she warns that for composition to keep its place in the academy, it must have an importance beyond that of first-year composition. For if that universal requirement is done away with, what will keep composition alive?
Questions
Can there really be a composition and rhetoric field without the first-year course? What does composition look like without that course? What is left – of our jobs and our research interests?
Quotes
“We are fettered to an enterprise not of our making, one inherited some one hundred years ago, and one over which we are able to exert little to no power. First-year writing…continues to be composed by other departments, other disciplines, and by other adminstrative units within colleges and universities.” (339)
“Disciplines are made up of individuals who are enmeshed in a complex webs of institutions that both make possible a range of problems and activities but that limit other problems and activities in which they can engage…disciplinary practices are carried out in real places by real people with their own complex assortment of political, social, and cultural beliefs.” (338)
“Disciplines are…composed by and, in turn, compose scholars.” (323)
Top Five
Bazerman, Charles. “Response: Curricular Responsibilities and Professional Definition.” Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction. Ed. Joseph Petraglia. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995. 249-59.
Booth, Wayne C. “The Idea of a University – As Seen by a Rhetorician.” Professing the New Rhetorics: A Sourcebook. Ed. Theresa Enos and Stuart C. Brown. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994. 228-52.
—- “The Revival of Rhetoric.” PLMA 80 (1965) 8-12.
Goggin, Maureen Daly. “Disciplinary Instability.” Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction. Ed. Joseph Petraglia. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995.27-48.
Lunsford, Andrea A. “Composing Ourselves: Politics, Commitment, and the Teaching of Writing.” College Composition and Communication 41 (1990): 71-82.
Toulmin, Stephen. Human Understanding. Vol. 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1972.
Goggin, Maureen Daly. “The Tangled Roots of Literature, Speech Communication, Linguistics, Rhetoric/Composition, and Creative Writing: A Selected Bibliography on the History of English Studies.” RSQ 29.4 (Fall 1999): 63-87.
This article is a large bibliography of the various fields in which scholarship in rhetoric and composition has been published. Through the extensive bibliographies, which include books, articles, and dissertations, Goggin proves that the field of composition and rhetoric is inherently multidisciplinary and in order to understand the complex nature of the discipline, one must look beyond the obvious and find the hidden scholarship in other areas.
Top Five
Just a good source for a lot of important texts to read. Look at it all!
