Composition: History & Theory: 2000 - 2009
College English, Volume 64, No. 5: May, 2002
Description
CONTENTS
The Cultures of Literature and Composition: What Could Each Learn from the Other? (Peter Elbow): In this article, Peter Elbow claims to put aside the “political and material issues of power, money, and prestige” that separate literature and composition studies in the English Department in order to focus on how the pedagogy and scholarship of both fields can benefit and learn from each other (533). Even though, Elbow admits, he has become somewhat of a corny guru of the writing community, he misses “the comfort of planning a whole class around a literary text” in order to be “stretched or even transformed by a text that is miraculously good” (535). As a composition teacher, Elbow finds his time spent “devising workshop activities designed to create experiences,” experiences that lead to livelier classes with less tooth-pulling (535). Essentially, he wishes that Composition Studies would “learn to give an equally central place to the imaginative and metaphorical dimensions of language” even if the goal is teaching essays (539). He also wishes that Literature Studies would “learn more inherent attention and concern for students—their lives and what’s on their minds” and learn to teach imaginative writing as a way of getting students to understand a literary text (539-540). Professionally, Elbow claims that when he was being trained as a literary scholar, he was trained in sophistication, a process that caused him to feel the pressure to become a superior person (to change his attitude toward others—especially those who did not appreciate “finer” or “higher” literary texts) (540). He wants literature people to learn from the “naivete, corniness, or innocence in the world of composition” in order to loosen-up and to take themselves less seriously, while he wants composition people to look to literature people as examples of strong, sophisticated scholars (542). At the same time, he warns new composition scholars to avoid the kind of infighting that has been traditionally associated with literary theorists. He fears it is “as if we can’t be a real discipline unless some vision or methodology or paradigm ‘wins’—as though one paradigm can’t be right unless the others are wrong” (544). [Side note: he also mentions the development of Creative Nonfiction as an emerging field for bringing Literature and Composition people together—that makes me fell warm and fuzzy inside.] Service-Learning, 1902 (Julia Garbus): This essay is a wonderfully researched “close look” at one woman’s contribution to the service-learning tradition. Instead of focusing on theory, Garbus focuses on “Progressive-era work at the level of practice—what college students actually learned and did—as opposed to examining Progressive reformers’ theories, on the one hand, or the workings of a large institution, such as a university, on the other” (548). In order to do this, she focuses on the life and work of Vida Scudder (1861-1954), a rebellious, radical woman who used teaching as a way of promoting social criticism and change during her tenure at Wellesley College. Garbus argues that the same questions that Scudder faced are important to teachers involved in service learning today: “Does service learning lead students to increased community involvement in their future lives, and, if so, to what extent? How can a teacher encourage independent thought? How can we foster self-confidence in students who have been told they are second-class citizens, like the women Scudder taught and many low-income students and students of color today? Is offering humanities instruction to the very poor empowering, or irrelevant, or even insulting? Can local organizations advance systematic change?” (562). Breaking Ground in Ecocomposition: Exploring Relationships between Discourse and Environment (Sidney I. Dobrin and Christine R. Weisser): This article outlines the difference between ecocriticism and ecocomposition and the value of including “place and environment as other critical categories” of inquiry in composition studies (567). “Ecocriticism,” the authors write, “is a literary criticism that looks toward textual interpretation; ecocomposition works from the same place, but is concerned with textual production and the environments that affect and are affected by the production of discourse” (577). Instead of focusing on nature writing, the authors argue that students can learn to look at all of the different environments that shape their writing (from the classroom environment to cyberspace), learn the discourse conventions of that environment, and produce public work that can promote positive social and political change. By changing the way others “speak” and “think” about these environments through the language used, essentially, ecocompositionists can help “change” the dominant social discourse, or change the way we speak, write, and think about certain environments (including the Environment with a capital “E”). The focus of ecocomposition is, at its heart, public. This focus on public applications “helps students to better understand the power of rhetoric and writing while at the same time giving students real reasons to learn the ‘subject matter’ of the issues they have chose to address and support” (281). Other articles: Herm Choppers, the Adonia, and Rhetorical Action in Ancient Greece (James Fredal): This article is a response to “current” arguments about the existence of Aspasia as the first woman rhetor in ancient Greece. Fredal argues that rhetoric and composition scholars should know better than being tied to texts as their only means of analyzing the potential rhetorical strategies available to women during the time period. Instead of getting into the Aspasia argument, Fredal outlines one event in Greece involving the mysterious mutilation of phallic (patriarchal) statues during a women’s festival before a brutal war campaign was set to begin. This is an amazing article, overall, and deserves attention from those interested in applying rhetorical analysis to historical events. Review: Material Matters: Bodies and Rhetoric (Krista Ratcliffe): Books reviewed in this article: Rhetorical Bodies by Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley, The Rhetoric of Midwifery: Gender, Knowledge, and Power by Mary M. Lay, & Body Talk: Rhetoric, Technology, Reproduction by Mary M. Lay, Laura J. Gurak, Clare Gravon, and Cynthia Myntti
CONNECTIONS AND REFLECTIONS (Rebecca B.)
The article about service-learning in 1902 directly relates to Joel Spring’s examination of Progressive Education and the development of the school as a social institution. Even though Spring focuses on how immigrants were dealt with in terms of the development of community showers, clubs, etc., this article is a nice complement to show that not all programs seemed as nefarious at the time of their inception. The example of Vida Scudder’s work shows that even though we might view some of the social programs as dehumanizing, there were people at the time who were working within their own very limited positions (in Scudder’s case—being a woman constantly threatened with the loss of her position for being too radical) who may have paved the way for more socialist thought (which did not die with the death of the progressive movement). Graff was actually quoted in Garbus’s article for recognizing Scudder as a radical in the English Department, mainly for her movement away from philology. Although Graff focuses on the development of the English Department as it relates to literary study, Scudder was a living, breathing example of where literary and composition pedagogies combined with social criticism (is it ironic that a response to Elbow’s pleas for the best of both fields could be found in 1902?).
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3/15/09