Mapping disciplinary territory through professional journals: composition and rhetoric scholarship in the 1970s

Abstract

Composition studies was "formed by and largely exists through professional journals in which our work appears" (Connors 348). Before Erika Lindemann's work with the Longmans annotated bibliography in 1984, there was no single research too available to rhetoric and composition scholars for access, utilization, and analysis of the publications in professional journals, even through these journals figure largely in the lives of professional academicians and scholars. Thus, many researchers cannot be sure they have comprehensive bibliographies or know of all previous existing work on their topic. Even though there are many published orientatory bibliographies, these are selective, interpretive, and by their very nature biased and dated. My dissertation, which attempts to address the problems I have defined above, comprises of three major sections: an index of all bibliographic citations of essays published in major composition and rhetoric journals between 1970 and 1979 (indexed by author and subject); an annotated bibliography of the bibliographic citations; and a long introductory essay which examines the kinds of research and teaching practices described, how teachers respond to their historical situation, and the pedagogy they recommend. The introductory essay is shaped by my interests in how historical narratives influence disciplinary activity in rhetoric and composition. Defining key words (process, expressive rhetoric, rhetoric, basic writing, and linguistics) according to the published essays in the 1970s, I use them as discursive markers and focal points for discussion. I contend that composition studies in the 1970s has been reductively caricatured in contemporary histories of the profession. In the "process" section, I explore the many different definitions of the word as developed in essays in 70s professional journals. I question the popular definition of process as a static, linear activity, beginning with prewriting and ending with rewriting. My study shows that debates underscored a rigorous exploration of not only the value of process but also its relationship to language and cognition. Although theories of self-discovery through/in writing have been traditionally connected with "expressive rhetoric," teachers who are labeled "expressivist" advocate a less self-involved, anti-intellectual, and socially isolated approach to writing than previously acknowledged. My reexamination of some essays in the 1970s highlights the ways in which James Berlin and Lester Faigley have simplistically described expressive pedagogy. The common perception of "rhetoric's" influence on the teaching of writing is as a legitimizing force for the discipline; thus many believe that the appropriation of classical rhetoric was quickly and easily accepted. I contradict is assumption and problematize the relationship of rhetoric ad composition studies while exploring the many uses and definitions of rhetoric. In exploring the influence of "basic writing," which has been portrayed as a "highly practical," trial-and-error oriented, essentialist, movement, I argue that the basic writing teachers were more sophisticated in their understanding of language than was earlier acknowledged. In the section on "linguistics," I build on Sharon Crowley's and Lester Faigley's work. I also explore the influence of linguistics in basic writing and on the Standard English debate. Complicating Faigley's claim that " (linguistics) was swept away by the movement toward understanding and teaching writing as a process," I describe how this area was subsumed under the activity of revision.