The politics of knowledge dissemination: academic journals in composition studies

Abstract

This study argues that the contemporary field of composition studies has been constructed and is maintained through a relatively static arrangement of professional publication criteria; journal publication defines professional boundaries, poses appropriate questions, and determines who is competent to answer. Current textual debates in the field are products of written scholarship itself; any answers can be visualized only through a lens ground(ed) in the present professional order of scholarly publishing in composition. Understanding composition studies as a profession rather than a discipline foregrounds the shared meta-ideology that motivates, potentializes, and authorizes compositionists of competing domain-specific epistemologies, methodologies, and conceptions of value. Adoption of late nineteenth-century criteria for professional "success" has necessitated a reinscription in composition of the institutional procedure whereby knowledge is commodified and exchanged within a limited market controlled by a hierarchy of productivity. The professionalization of the field has led to the marginalization or devaluation of composition teachers and teaching within the context of composition studies itself. Situating the research/teaching binary within the economic system that contains it demonstrates the economic advantage that accrues to the publicists--editors, peer reviewers, and publishing authors--who trade in the marketable currency of text-based products and the disadvantaged condition of the vast majority of writing teachers who are neither producers nor consumers. This study also examines the practice of editing in composition, focusing on the normative influence of editorial decisions, including the selection of peer reviewers and the ironic preservation of formalistic concerns. It engages contemporary editing theory in its own terms, deconstructing the principal oral metaphors--"conversation," "dialogue"--used to refer to the publishing enterprise. Also considered are proposals for editorial reform and alternatives to the current publication model.