Composition: History & Theory: 1930 - 1939
From the Student’s Point of View
Description
College Composition and Communication , Volume 13, No. 1 (February, 1962), begins with a collection of personal reflections from composition teachers/writers about their own experiences in Freshman Composition in (primarily) the late thirties. Some interesting quotes from this issue that give an idea of what the classroom was like during this time period (or an idea of the kinds of students who came out of these courses) follow:
- “I could not know a chief reason for the existence of a Freshman Course in Composition--as therapy for graduate students and recent PhD.’s” (Leslie Fiedler 1).
- “But we were forbidden Yiddishisms as we were forbidden slang . . . Nobody had ever told us that the American language was still to be invented--was always to be invented--as it has been invented and reinvented by urban Jews . . . Saul Bellow, for instance” (Leslie Fielder 2).
- “So another traditional function of the classical Freshman Composition Course is abandoned: the attempt to impose yesterday’s taste and yesterday’s usage on tomorrow’s writers, thus defining a world against which the future can define itself” (Leslie Fielder 3).
- S. I. Hayakawa remembers a student learning in his class (when he was a TA in the 30s) that Frank Lloyd Wright was not just a local “crackpot,” but a famous architect (5).
- “Most students need Freshman English when they enter college, not, as is widely thought, because they need to learn the mechanics of writing . . . but principally because they need a course in which to mull over, digest, and encompass the experience of their transition from their hometown, high-school culture to the wider culture of their college studies” (Hayakawa 5).
- “The reason for my own enthusiasm for semantics in Freshman English is that I know of no other subject that gives students so effectively a sense of their own intellectual power--and a sense of both the pleasure and responsibility of using that power” (Hayakawa 5-6).
- “This was Old Dame English, a missionary for the One Correct Church. Her cherubim were commas, her Catechism grammar” (Jack Brenner 14).
Date of Upload
3/13/09