Composition: History & Theory: 1800 - 1865
Coeducation and the Oral Tradition
Description
Robert Connors, in Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy (1997), illustrates how postwar composition classes tripled in size (100 students+), how coeducation changed rhetoric from agonistic (aggressive, argumentative, competitive) to irenic (cooperative, peaceful); and how writing became the focus of composition-rhetoric. Connors argues that abrupt, vast, and lasting changes swept rhetoric as a discipline in 19th century. Change resulted from external, social, and economic pressures rather than scholarly developments. The most important change was coeducation.
Between 1820 and 1900, the rhetorical discipline “[adopted] an almost completely new base of theory” and accompanying new pedagogies, “an almost completely changed audience and constituency” and totally altered cultural status (24). In the first half of the 19th century, rhetoric faculty routinely engaged students in “agonistic ritual”; contestitive orations to prepare them for civic duty (25). This oral argumentative tradition was exclusively masculine—as were the students. When women entered universities on feminism’s first wave, rhetoric transformed from its masculine, aggressive, public, oral form to a feminine, irenic, private, written form. Men refused to engage women in agonistic ritual or allow women to learn how to make moral arguments . Written rhetoric, the composition compromise, became the discipline’s focus just as explosive student enrollments forced faculty to adopt reductive pedagogical strategies—emphasis on correctness, form, discourse modes—to manage student loads and fix the “illiteracy crisis.” This created a permanent underclass: the writing faculty.
Also according to Connors, 19th century coeducation produced major changes in rhetoric in four areas: 1) student-teacher relationships, 2) oral to written discourse, 3) argumentative to multimodal pedagogy, 4) decline of abstract, exterior-based writing topics and rise of concrete, interior, personal topics. Before 1860, most colleges were exclusively male, with “a campus atmosphere entirely controlled by the ethos surrounding fraternity life” (45). Coeducation caused all-male agonistic rhetoric to lose its place as the “staple of college life” (48). Curricular change from classical to elective, in response to the demand for professionalization and booming enrollment, displaced oral rhetoric. The irenic rhetoric of composition took its place, as testing became more “objective.”
Date of Upload
3/13/09