CCR 735 Notes for 9/11 Nystrand

Nystrand, Martin, Stuart Greene, and Jeffrey Wiemelt. “Where Did Composition Studies Come from?: An Intellectual History.” Written Communication 10:3 (July 1993) 285-333.

Part 3: Language, Literature, and Composition through the Structuralist Lens of Social Constructionism

In the 1980s, scholars of langauge, writing, and literature were interested in how the social context affects the production and the reading of texts and argued that there could not be only one interpretation, given the ever-shifting historical circumstances of both readers and authors. This view of language as a social phenomenon (esp. Labov) challenged the Chomskian structuralist view that was in vogue a decade before. Compositionists began to see the importance of teaching across genres and departments (writing across the curriculum movement) and claimed that writers do not write solitarily or independently; they are always a member of a community (a discourse community), and that community restricts some of their choices. 

Quotable Quotes

“Structuralism, in both its constructivist and social constructionist incarnations, generally superseded formalism and assumed, as noted above, that human behavior and institutions can be explained only by elucidating the mediating structure of an underlying abstract system…Whereas formalist critics like the New Critics focused on text elements to uncover their meaning, structuralists examined such elements to decode an underlying, universal system” (292).

Part 4: Dialogism in Language, Literature, and Composition

Bakhtin developed a third perspective on language, different from both formal structuralism and social constructivism: dialogism. Dialogism means that the self (and meaning) only exists when others around, because the self’s identity is formed through the relationships with those outside of it. Meaning in discourse is created in dialogue. According to Bakhtin, the fundamental unit of language is the conversation turn, since the meaning of any utterance is determined by the utterance’s relationship to other utterances. Any understanding of discourse must be situated in the actual social context in which it was created and used – language is fundamentally DYNAMIC.

Halliday developed a theory of language that contrasts with Chomsky’s view that there are innate language rules embedded in the human conscious; Halliday’s theory is environmentalist – langauge is both a way of knowing and a way of doing, of constructing knowledge. Language both organizes the world and allows people to communicate world experiences with each other, and an individual’s context shapes the experiences he will communicate. Texts develop meaning, then, out of the dialogic, dynamic relationship between them and their readers – it is a meaning that is always developing and is never the same from reader to reader. Context is created by the writer and the reader.

Quotable Quotes

“Meaning is ‘dialgoic,’ reflecting writers’ attempts to balance their goals with the expectations that they believe their readers bring to a text” (294).

“The individual and the social provide neither competing nor even alternative perspectives on meaning in discourse; rather, context and cognition operate always and only in an interpenetrating, cocon-stitutive relationship” (295).\

“Dialgoism and functionalism have attacked the neoplatonic strategies of structuralism, challenging the validity of underlying universal forms” (300).

“Cognitive and social domains interact and overlap in a dialectical, coconstitutive relationship: The work of cognition is ‘always already’ social. ‘Discourse does not reflect a situation, it is a situation’ (Holquist, 1990, p. 63)” (300).

Notable Notes

Some binary (and more) pairs: structuralist/functionalist; structuralism/social constructionism/dialogism

Part 5: Thematic Development in Conceptions of Language, Literature, and Composition since 1940

What has happened to the fields of composition, linguistics, and literary theory since 1940? In trying to understand the nature of both langauge and meaning, they have gone from formalism to structuralism to functionalism/dialogism. Composition in particular has moved from examining the text outside of context to viewing it as an individual act of cognition through the process movement to seeing it in a greater social and historical context. Study in grammar and syntax went from being prescriptive to descriptive; individual cognition has been enriched by an understanding of a socially situated cognition. Reader response has become a necessary component of understanding texts, as seen by the increase in portfolio assessments, which showcase the writer’s ability to write for a variety of rhetorical situations.

Here are some of the new sites of scholarship in langauge study:

• moving beyond canonical texts to studying popular culture, bridging towards interdisciplinary fields like feminism, multiculturalism. Also, investigating the writing of school students, business professionals, nonacademics instead of focusing primarily on formal academic expository writing.
• everyday conversation and writing is regarded as important as formal speech, writing, and texts. They are worthy enough of study because real theories and practices can emerge from them.

Quotable Quotes

Current interest in amalgamating cognitve and social orientations into either dialogical or sociocognitivie perspectives seems to derive almost entirely from responses to theoretical frameworks and research agendas rather than from the demands of instruction. In short, a new scholarly discourse has emerged during the past two decades so that the context for ideas about writing – the site of action projects – is now an interdisiplinary writing research community as well as a pedagogical forum” (314).

Notable Notes

Great chart on pg. 302-303 about formalism, constructivism, social constructionism, and dialogism.

The conclusion from pg. 312-314 does a good job of summing up the article and the historical movements that have affected research on language in the field of composition.

CCR 735 Notes Barton

Barton, Ellen. “Linguistics and Discourse Analysis.” In English Studies: An Introduction to the Discipline(s). Ed. Bruce McComiskey. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 2006. 67-81.

In this essay, the author discusses the place of lingusitics in the academy. She explains that often lingusitics (as a scientific study of language) is defined as its own discipline but is closely related (by tenure lines, faculty, joint programs) to English departments as well.  Her primary purpose in the essay is to look at ways in which lingusitics and discourse analysis have situated themselves in English departments and how this placement has informed both the fields of English studies and of linguistics, especially in how the theories and theorizing practices of English can enrich linguistic discourse analysis. Her argument is based on her study of the topic of prognosis in the discourse of medicine. In the first part of her essay, she reviews some of the major 20th century linguistics theorists, including Saussure, Boaz, Sapir, Bloomfield, and Chomsky. She points out that linguistics sees language both synchronically (out of time – focus on the structures) and diachronically (in historical context.) Linguistics has a dual, interdisciplinary scientific/humanities identity: it has recieved federal funding through the National Science Foundation because it has argued that language is cognitive (scientific) and has been funded through the National Endowment for the Humanities because of the work done on the social context for language. Discourse analysis projects that are based on linguistics are one kind of interdisicplinary research projects English studies and linguistics scholars can pursue.

Quotable Quotes

“My experience leads me to argue that lingusitics provides a substantive and robust theory of language as an object of study and offers discourse analysis as an empircal method for describing the organization of language in context; English studies provides an equally substantive and robust understanding of discourses as configurations of power and knowledge and offers a range of interpretive and critical methods for theorizing discourses” (69).

“A broader, though still controversial, characterization of teh field might be to say that linguistics investigates language as both a cognitive and social object, viewing language as a set of structures and a variety of functions. Under this view, speakers have internalized both the rules of grammatical structure and the conventions that underlie the situated and communicative functions of language in context” (77).

Notable Notes

When was linguistics founded? 1916 (pub. of Saussure); 1911 (pub. of Franz Boas); 1933 (pub. of Bloomfield’s Language); 1957 (pub. of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures.)

Saussure = distinguishes between langue (a language system) and parole (an individual act of speech situated in a certain context.)

Boas/Sapir = described the structure of native American languages

Bloomfield = developed a grammar of langauge, building up from sounds (phoentics) to words (morphology) to sentences (syntax) to discourse. He believed that linguistics could not study meaning scientifically.

Chomsky = shot down behaviorism as a way to explain langauge structure and acquisition; he believed that the ability of humans to acquire langauge has to do with cognition and development. Rules of langauges and grammar are deeply embedded in the human mind.

Barton, Ellen and Gail Stygall. Discourse Studies in Composition. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2002. 1-9.

The editors of this collection, Barton and Stygall, point out that the systematic study of discourses (linguistics and discourse analysis) has not been fully incorporated into the field of composition even though the two have parallel and sometimes overlapping histories and purposes. They blame some of the lack of coordination between the two fields to a tension between the composition teacher’s authority on how to teach individual students how to write (and the emerging process movement) and linguistics’ scientific studies on the proper use and structure of language. This tension did not prevent all interaction; both compositionists and discourse scholars attended the Dartmouth Conference in 1966 and the British linguists and compositionists there (Britton, Dixon) profoundly affected the American attendees and the development of the American discipline of composition. Composition and linguistics also joined forces during the heydey of the sentence combining era of the 1970s, but many in composition who were suspicious of this scientific, seemingly prescriptive approach dismissed it and moved further and further away from linguistic study. In the 1980s, linguistics took a contextual, social turn and began investigating spoken langauge in the new sub-field of discourse analysis. Linguistic theory, though, dropped out of favor in the late 1980s in the college English curriculum, as focus was shifted to literature and writing. However, discourse analysis research does pop up in composition research through cohesion analysis of texts, second language writing research and analysis, studies in language variation, and literacy issues.

Quotable Quotes

“The primary strengths that discourse studies brings to composition are in its ability to do two things: to elaborate and specify the discourse features of writing itself and to elaborate and specify the discourse contexts in which writing takes place” (3).

“What discourse analysis brings to composition, then, is both a theory of language in use and a methodology with which to formulate and test insights about social interaction and structural analysis” (9).

Notable Notes

Look into the Oregon Curriculum – transformational grammar in the secondary schools.

Sentence combining in the 1970s was composition’s answer to teaching grammar – Frank O’Hare, John Mellon, William Strong, Miami University, Donald Daiker, Francis Christensen

1987 meeting of the English Coalition Conference (“Democracy through Langauge”)

CCR 691 Notes for 9/10 Ricoeur

Ricoeur, Paul. “What Is a Text? Explanation and Understanding” In Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Langauge, Action, and Interpretation. Ed. John B. Thompson. Paris: Cambridge University Press, 1981. 145-164.

Ricoeur’s essay investigates the debate between the two prevailing theories about the reading of texts: one, the scientific and positivist approach, where understanding the text means explanation, and two, the humanistic understanding and interpreation of a text. He starts by first questioning what a text is – the fundamental starting point for the two different attitudes, explanation and interpretation – and what the relationship is between writing and speaking. Ricoeur believes that writing can be discourse directly inscribed, not just a translation of speech into words and symbols. His central argument is that the binary between the camps of explanation and interpretation does not take into account the complex nature of the text itself, and that reading calls for a complementary and reciprocal relationship between explanation and interpretation. Strutural analysis (explanation) is, according to Ricouer, a stage in the process of understanding – it is the bridge between elementary and sophisticated analysis and interpretation. Ricoeur’s new understanding of a text can be depicted as a triangle where all legs are dependent on each other – the text (the object), the sign (the semantic, structural understanding of the text), and the interpretant (the series of interpretations of the text over time.)

Quotable Quotes

“A text is any discourse fixed by writing” (145).

“Whence the conviction that writing is fixed speech, that inscription, whether it be graphics or recording, is inscription of speech – an inscription which, thanks to the subsisting character of the engraving, guarantees the persistence of speech” (146).

“When the text takes the place of speech, something important occurs. In speech, the interlocutors are present not only to one another, but also to the situation, the surroundings and the circumstantial milieu of discourse. It is in relation to this circumstantial milieu that discourse is fully meaningful” (148). This is why langauge is full of signifiers of time and place (adverbs, tenses, pronouns, etc.) With the text, the words become everything. “When the text takes the place of speech, there is no longer a speaker, at least in the sense of an immediate and direct self-designation of the one who speaks in the instance of discourse. This proximity of the speaking subject to his own speech is replaced by a complex relation of the author to the text, a relation which enables us to say that the author is instituted by the text, that he stands in the space of meaning traced and inscribed by writing. The text is the very place where the author appears” (149).

“We can, as readers, remain in the suspense of the text, treating it as a worldless and authorless object; in this case, we explain the text in terms of its internal relations, its structure. On the other hand, we can lift the suspense and fulfil the text in speech, restoring it to living communication; in this case, we interpret the text. These two possibilities both belong to reading, and reading is the dialectic of these two attitudes” (152).

“To read is, on any hypothesis, to conjoin a new discourse to the discourse of the text. THis conjunction of discourses reveals, in the very constitution of the text, an original capactiy for renewal which is its open character. Interpretation is the concrete outcome of conjunction and renewal” (158).

If “we regard strutural analysis as a stage – and a necessary one – between a naive and a critical interpretation, between a surface and a depth interpretation along a unique hermeneutical arc and to integrate the opposed attitudes of explanation and understanding within an overall conception of reading as the recovery of meaning” (159).

“To explain is to bring out the structure, that is, the internal relations of dependence which constitute the statics of the text; to interpret is to follow the path of thought opened up by the text, to place oneself enroute toward the orient of the text” (160).

Ricoeur, Paul. “Metaphor and the Central Problem of Hermeneutics.” In Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Langauge, Action, and Interpretation. Ed. John B. Thompson. Paris: Cambridge University Press, 1981. 165-181.

This essay’s aim is to compare the problem of interpretation to the problem of the metaphor, which is investigated by rhetoric, semantics, and stylistics. In the introduction, the author tackles the question about why there is a problem with the interpretation of texts; he notes two problems are that written texts stand alone without a physical author or speaker and can be taken up in a variety of situations by different readers and that written texts seem to “be opposed to the concept of explanation” because the interpretation is necessarily subjective, which is why hermeneutics is declared to be the opposite of scientific explanation (165). He explains the fundamental difference between the text and the metaphor – the work (boiled down to the sentence) and the word (166) – yet both are locations for discourse. He points out that the metaphor relies on the situation to make meaning, just as the text does. To interpret a text or a metaphor, the reader must make a guess (through a method) to what the author’s meaning is; that guess is influenced by the reader’s situation. Some guesses are more probable than others, as they utilize more textual “clues,” but no interpretation is more truthful than another. Interpreation of both a text and a metaphor opens up a new world of understanding and meaning – it requires the imagination.

Quotable Quotes

“Discourse has not merely one sort of reference but two: it is related to an extralinguistic reality, to the world or a world; and it refers equally to its own speaker, by means of specific procedures which function only in the sentence and hence in discourse – personal pronouns, verbal tenses, demonstratives, etc. In this way, language has both a reference to reality and a self-reference”  (168).

“Such is the fundamental feature of explanation which makes metaphor a paradigm for the explanation of a literary work. We construct the meaning of a text in a manner similar to the way in which we make sense of all the terms of a metaphorical statement.

“Why must we ‘construct’ the meaning of a text? First, because it is written: in the asymmetrical relation betwen the text and the reader, one of the partners speaks for both. Bringing a text to language is always something other than hearing someone and listening to his speech. Reading resembles instead the performance of a musical piece regulated by the written notations of the score. For the text is an autonomous space of meaning which is no longer animated by the intention of its author; the autononmy of the text, deprived of this essential support, hands writing over to the sole intepretation of the reader.

“A second reason is that the text is not only something written but is a work, that is, a singlular totlaity. As a totality, the literary work cannot be reduced to a sequence of sentences which are individually intelligible; rather it is an architecture of themes and purposees which can be constructed in several ways. The relation of part to whole is ineluctably circular” (174-175).

Both interpretation of a text and a metaphor are questions of “‘making sense,’ of producing the best overall intelligibility from an apparently discordant diversity” (175).

The purpose of the metaphor – “The function of poetry as the creative imitation of reality…If it is true that the poem creates a world, then it requires a language which preserves and expresses its creative power in specific contexts” (180).

“Why should we draw new meanings from our langauge is we have nothing new to say, no new world to project? The creations of language would be devoid of sense unless they served the general project of letting new worlds emerge by means of poetry” (181).

CCR 735 Notes for 9/4

Different ways of tracing this history: Mailloux (professional organizations); Parker (published scholarship and departments, English and American higher education history); McComiskey (department foundation and separation and impact of larger sociopolitical movements); Nystrand (academic movements inside and outside English departments, published studies, conventions)

Zebroski, James T. “Hidden by History: English Education and the Origins of Composition and Rhetoric.”

The author notes that in the many histories of the development of the field of composition and rhetoric, the place and contribution of English education has been left out, claiming that in the 1970s (the crucial time for the foundation of the field of comp/rhet), the people doing the most research and writing on composition were English teachers, especially freshman English teachers. He argues that this history has disappeared due to the stigma attached to the scholarship in composition and English education of the 1960s and 1970s, which was focused primarily on the writing habits of working class students and the pedagogical implications of the social issues of the time. He also argues that it was these working class students, who presented challenges to the traditional ways of teaching reading and writing, that allowed for the government funding in the 1970s and 1980s that shaped the new discipline of composition and rhetoric. His paper narrows in on a five-year period (1968-1972) in order to uncover the hidden, complex histories of the formation of the field of composition and rhetoric, including the rise of student authorship, the emphasis on adult (over student) composition and knowledge, the meaning of the Dartmouth Conference retroactively to the field of composition and rhetoric, the importance of federal funding prior to the Reagan years, and the effect of federal assistance programs like Upward Bound on the discipline.

Parker, William Riley. “Where Do English Departments Come From?” College English 28 (1967), 339-350.

Parker’s history of the development of English as a discipline uses as evidence the histories of English and American universities and colleges like Cambridge, Harvard, and Oxford, including the establishment of chairs, the appointment of professors in English literature and language, and the production of literary criticism and other scholarship. He notes that the study of English in colleges and universities is only 100 years old (1967 publication date) and departments of English are even younger. They were formed by the joining of rhetoric/oratory and philology. Even though it was in the 19th century that departments emerged (due to the German university system, which favored specialization and majors), the serious study and criticism of English literature and language dated back hundreds of years to the Renaissance. Harvard did not have a professor of English until 1876 and Cambridge didn’t have one until 1911. The chair of rhetoric at Oxford was established in 1759 for Hugh Blair; Harvard established the Boylston chair of rhetoric for John Quincy Adams in 1806. The author points to the booming population of universities in the mid-19th century and the construction of new, not religiously affiliated colleges and universities as the reason for the adoption of English literature and language as a respected area of study, as a sort of backlash to the elitism inherent in older institutions that privileged the teaching of the classics. English was a field for the middle class. At the turn of the twentieth century, starting with Johns Hopkins, there was the creation of graduate programs; many of these programs in English were combined physically and ideologically with German, as the German model of higher education was the new standard and philology, the focus of the early 20th century English departments, came from the German scientific tradition. English departments became the home of the teachers of the required freshman course – a necessary course in the pragmatically-framed new universities; composition allowed literature to survive at an institutional level at a time when other humanities-based fields, like classics, were cut. For really, why is it any more valuable to know English literature than it is to know Greek? In the 1880s and 1890s, there was a reform movement in higher education that led to the restructuring of universities to allow for greater specializaiton; the author argues that because English literature was adopted as an accepted field of study in the mid-19th century, it was allowed to take over rhetoric as the home for composition, something that was not accomplished in English universities. Departments became very important in this era of specialization because there was no longer any centralized curriculum, and college officials were forced to judge which departments were sustainable and necessary and which ones weren’t, and awarded new faculty lines to the ones they deemed essential. This caused a large amount of territorialism between related departments. It was in this desparate fight for funding and recognition that English literature departments grabbed on to other related fields in order to increase the size of their departments: linguistics, rhteoric, and later journalism, technical writing, creative writing, drama, and theater. Parker claims that the association in the Scottish chairs of rhetoric with belles letters allowed for the adoption of rhetoric by English departments in the late 19th century.

Quotable Quotes

“I stress these dates in order to remind you that the teaching of English is a Johnny-come-lately – a fact that has some relevance to any answer given the question “Why can’t Johnny read?” Our research and criticism are old; our jobs are new” (342).

“The regius professorship at Edinburgh and the Boylston professorship at Harvard were harbingers of things to come, but were not, essentially, first steps in the deveolpment of an academic discipline that could demand, and get, equal recognition with the classical langauges. For such a revolutionary change in established patterns of education some other factors were necessary – among them, a new, scientific linguistics, a new and rigorous methodology adaptable to literary studies, and a new concept of liberal education. These three factors were all to emerge during the last three quarters of the nineteenth century, but their impacts and results were to be different in the United States from what they were in England” (344).

Why did the classical curriculum fail? The “impact of science, the American spirit of utilitarianism or pragmatism, and the exciting, new dream of democratic, popular education, an assumed corollary of which was the free elective system [German university model]. A fourth factor may be described as a widespread mood of questioning and experimentation in education, a practical, revisionary spirit that challenged all traditions and accepted practices” (347).

“It was the teaching of freshman composition that quickly entrenched English departments in the college and university structure – so much so that no one seemed to mind when professors of English, once freed from this slave labor, became as remote from everyday affairs as the classicists had ever been” (347).

“English departments became the catchall for the work of teachers of extremely diverse interests and training, untied rhetorically but nto actually by their common use of the mother tongue. Disintegration was therefore inevitable” (348).

“Thanks first to its academic origins, and then to the spirit of competition and agressiveness engendered by departmentalization, ‘English’ has never really defined itself as a discipline” (348).

“The ancient subject of rhetoric, which at first showed signs of adapting itself to changing times while preserving both its integrity and its vitality, in the nineteenth century lost both integrity and independent vitality by dispersing itself to academic thinness. It permitted oratory to become identified with elocution, and, as for written composition, it allowed this to become chiefly identified with that dismal, unflowering desert, freshman theme-writing. It was little wonder that speech and composition were readily accepted by administrators as appendices of English literature, especially when various events conspiried to tie the knot so tightly” (349).

Nystrand, Martin. “Where Did Composition Studies Come From?” Written Communication 10:3 (July 1993) 267-285.

The author argues against the popular notion that attributes the rise of composition as a discipline to the literacy crisis, open-admissions policies, and social movements of the 1970s, claiming instead that the field was shaped and formed by larger intellectual forces that affected other disciplines (esp. linguistics and literature), including debates over ways of knowing (epistemologies), ways of conducting research (methodologies), and ways of understanding how language works and functions. The first academic “era” to affect the formation of composition was, according to the author, formalism and New Criticism, which emphasized close, objective readings of texts – solving the texts as if they were math problems. Students were encouraged to imitate the model texts they were given and compose straightforward, concise texts that often took the form of 5-paragraph themes that emphasized the objectivity of the content, not the individuality of the student writer. The formalism movement came under attack in the 1960s by scholars who believed that writing should be thought of a cognitive process, not just a finished product. These scholars wanted more research done on the act of writing and how both the student’s history and background and the relationship between reading and writing affected the composition of texts. They stressed the importance of the situation – how the task and the environment affects the outcome of the assignment; in essence, they argued it was impossible to assess or understand a text without considering its rhetorical situation. The banner of the constructivists was taken up at the 1966 Dartmouth conference, where English and American writing teachers met and many reformers (Dixon, Moffett, Britton) claimed that composition should be centered around the student, not the reproduction of texts. They said that writing was a cognitive process – people write for something and for someone. This budding interest in structuralism led to many empirical studies in the field of composition, including Emig’s The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, in which she showed that school assignments often curtailed students’ own individual writing purposes and that the composing process is organic and circular, not prescriptive. The process of composing is essential to making meaning. Nystrand claims that this shift in focus from the text to the act of writing owes a lot to the field of cognitive psychology and linguistics (scholars Chomsky, Miller, Bruner), who were all working in Cambridge. The new linguistics proposed by Chomsky argued that language could not be understood only by breaking down formal language structures but rather by transformational, generative grammar – the individual, abstract, deep, and biologocial development of a person’s language system. This was a change from formalism to constructivism. The embrace of constructivism opened up doors for scholars in English to take more seriously study in composition and reader-response criticism.

Quotable Quotes

The four elements of formalism on pg. 278 – “1. Langauge is composed of objective elements organized into fixed systems. 2. The meaning of texts is encoded in ‘autonomous’ texts themselves and is explicit to the extent that writers spell things out. 3. Written texts are more explicit than oral utterances. 4. Texts are properly interpreted only when readers avoid inferences about the writer or the content in which the text was written” (278).

Constructivist view of language: “Language orders and gives shape and thus meaning to experience” (285).

CCR 735 Notes for 9/4 McComiskey and Mailloux

McComiskey, Bruce, ed. English Studies: An Introduction to the Disciplines. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 2006. 1-26.

In the introduction, the author argues that English studies is a discipline that must work to explain its aims and purposes to the larger academic community since it is defined so differently by English studies scholars. In order understand what the field of English studies entails, McComiskey briefly traces the historical development of the discipline, starting with ancient Greek rhetorical studies, and at how different disciplines, such as discourse analysis, linguistics, rhetoric and composition, creative writing, critical theory, cultural studies, literature and literary analysis, and English education, influenced the field. In the 19th century, philology (the historical study of a development of a langauge) greatly influenced English studies and literature was used as the object of study for philology; philology turned English studies into a more “respectable” scientific discipline for the German modern university system. Those who opposed the scientific bent of philology introducted creative writing to bolster English studies’ humanistic identity. Another 19th century battle in English studies was the place of rhetoric, which was reduced to the required freshman composition course, and scholars who wanted the discipline to occupy a place of respect in the academy cut all ties with areas like composition, creative writing, and speech and created English departments centered around philology. The first journals of the English studies field favored philological studies (theory) over other subjects (practice.) John Dewey lamented the privileging of theory over practice and believed pedagogy was important enough to study at the collegiate level. In the 1900s, the philologists had to contend with linguistics, who unlike the philologists, believed that the study of spoken language – not the isolated study of literary texts – gave the most insight about the nature of langauge. Anti-German sentiment of WWI and the rise of linguistics led to the retreat of the philologists to anthropology; this first secession was followed by the creation of independent lingusitics departments, leaving English to be a primarily humanities-based discipline. Then, the rise of literary criticism, attributed partially to the growing interest in American literature due to WWI nationalism, as the centerpiece of English studies pushed out speech communication, which formed its own discipline so that they were not regulated to the service freshman course. However, post-WWII, English studies’ humanities bent left it out of national grants to bolster higher education, which were reserved for science, technology, and foreign language study that would help win the Cold War. English was saved in the 1970s by the literacy crisis in EAmerican education, which helped New Criticism (analysis of literature through a more scientific objective lens rather than a humanistic, subjective one) emerge in a prominent place in the field. New Criticism, however, alienated creative writers and also, with its focus on literature as synchronic text, made it irrelevant to outside political and social movements. English studies then abandoned New Criticism and took on the agendas of the various social movements in the 1960s and 1970s and attempted to revise the canon; this adoption of outside causes caused a conservative backlash in the 1980s – a crisis of criticism – in which scholars bemoaned the lack of foundations and truth because of the embrace of relativism due to the specialization of sub-field and sub-disciplines that affected the reading of texts, such as multiculturalism, feminism, and cultural studies. The backlash led to a rise in the practical wings of English studies – education, rhet/comp, creative writing, and lingusitics. Trained in rhetoric and composition, the new English studies professors adopted critical pedagogy in the 1980s and the 1990s. Around this time, the plurality of the discipline was acknowledged by its changed name: English studies, not just English.

Quotable Quotes

“In its earliest manifestations, attempting in part to disntinguish itself from other more established disciplines like classics, ‘English’ meant a mixture of things: the practice of oratory, the study of rhetoric and grammar, the composition of poetry, and the appreciation of literature, not just in the English language, but written in England by English authors” (7).

“In the context of the new modern university, where disicplines were defined by clear methodological boundaries and exclusive objects of study, English studies’ mixture of functions was not respected” (7).

“The 1950s and 1960s, then, saw a more radical devaluation of English studies than any other age in American history, and this devaluation was a direct result of government intervention” (18).

“This windfall for liteary studies would end (or should have ended) during the late twentieth century with the evolving professionalization of composition studies and its emergence as a full academic discipline in its own right” (19).

“With the general shift in education from theory to practice, linguistics, composition, creative writing, and English education had an opportunity to (re)assert themselves as pragmatic arts, as means to communicate effectivel in a troubled social context. But no such (re)assertion emerged, partly because English studies was so strongly associated then with literature, because the humanities in general were being devalued, and because science ruled with an iron fist (19).

“But, objective and disinterested though it may have appeared, the fact is that New Criticism detached itself from any relevance outside of the academy by locating meaning entirely within the confines of the text: rigorous, perphas, but socially and politically irrelevant” (22).

Notable Notes

The German university system split the disciplines into two camps: the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaft) and the arts and humanities (Geistewissenschaft) (5).

English is such a popular undergraduate major – is it because of the freedom inherent in the loosely tied together components of the field? The murkiness of the purpose of English studies seems to be an institutional problem for funding and respect, but is that problem mitigated by the droves of students (mostly female) who are drawn to the field?

In the mid-20th century, English studies (meaning literary criticism) was so unpopular that the only thing that kept English departments afloat was the required freshman composition course. But this was short to last, as rhetoric and comp at the same time was declaring itself to be a separate field.

Mailloux, Steven. Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2006.

The author, in the hopes of encouraging greater collaboration between English and communication, looks at how both English departments and speech communication departments have claimed rhetoric and included rhetorical studies in their research agendas and curriculum in the 20th century, focusing on two major periods of time: 1910-1920 (the establishment of new disciplines using scientific rhetoric) and the 1990s (during disputes over the rhetorical study of science.) He traces the history of the split between the two disicplines by looking at the foundation of professional organizations in each field – 1915 founding of NAATPS (speech) and 1911 founding of NCTE (focused on pedagogy that was abandoned by MLA.) He claims that speech teachers were driven to form their own disciplinary field in order to escape the se cond-class status they had in English departments. Rhetoric did not leave English departments at the same time; both scholars in English (Fred Newton Scott) and speech communication advocated for a return to rhetoric and were ignored by many in both fields. English and speech missed another opportunity to join together in the 1950s, when NCTE (English) formed CCCC and SAA (speech) formed a parallel society concerned with communication, NSSC. The 1960s, with the publication of Kuhn, Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca, and Gadamer brought about the notion of paradigm shifts and led to a new emphasis on rhetoric and interpretation as self-reflexive practices essential for understanding disciplinary identity. The author cites the continuation of stubborn disciplinary identities as a barrier for cooperative work in rhetorical studies between the fields of English, speech communication, and composition. The benefits of such cooperation include dialoges between scholarship in all aspects of rhetoric, which can enlighten all involved, better cooperation between college and K-12 teachers, and create new connections between old, classical traiditons and new shcolarship.

In his chapter “Places in Time,” the author uses another historical example to show how disciplinary identities were formed in English. He uses a paper delivered by James Morgan Hart at the 1885 MLA conference to show how the identity of English was formed through a deliberate “placement of rhetoric in relation to literature and modern philology in the academic study of English,” which relegated rhetoric to grammar drills and literature and philology as the true theoretical discipline (125).

Quotable Quotes

About the place of rhetoric in the time 1910-1920: “So at the moment when a new discipline was gaining increased visibility and intellectual autonomy for public speaking, the interdiscipline of rhetoirc and its humanistic tradition was not immediately dominant in that discipline and was marginalized in its former institutional home. Whereas the new discipline, speech, could view rhetoric as not scientific or modern enough, the older one, English, valued rhetorical traditions primarily as literary background, rhetoric not being literary enough, and relegated its pedagogical practices to composition teachers” (15).

“A multidisciplinary coalition of rhetoricians will help consolidate the work in written and spoken rhetoric, histories of literacies and communication technologies, and the cultural study of graphic, audio, visual, and digital media. Such consolidation can lead to more historically fine-grained analysis and more rigorous theorizing of the discursive interplay between the local and the global and of the rhetorical exchanges among and in different cultures. Reuniting the language arts at the collegel level will also facilitate working more effectively with K-12 teachers, who in many schools have kept these arts together in their curricula. And (nto)finally, increased collaboration between English and communication rhetoricians will help establish a more useful framework for refiguring the relation of what is old and new in the humanistic tradition, especially by encouraging the rethinking of various inherited oppositions: between classical tradition s and postmodern discourses, between renewed aesthetic formalisms and newer sociopoltical critiques of culture” (33).

The author’s argument: “A rethinking of all English studies as cultural rhetoric studies” (127).

“These separations make for a highly fragmented approach to all things rhetorical in academic scholarship, resulting in isolated disciplinary work on everything to do with tropes, arguments, and narratives in historical research and contemporary culture” (129).

Notable Notes

Is it institutionally possible to reunite these disciplines (which, depending on the university or college, are separated into different departments or not)? Isn’t it a larger question on enrollment, funding, etc? Will another decrease in student enrollment, like during the 1970s-1980s, cause greater collaboration?