Composition: History & Theory: 1980 - 1989
Robert J. Connors
Description
When Robert Conners came on the scene (late 70s/early 80s) after graduating from OSU with a Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition in 1980, there was an influx of students in academia and a number of deans and department chairs who weren’t sure how to handle them all through traditional teaching methods. This, Andrea A. Lunsford and Lisa Ede, explain in the forward to Selected Essays of Robert J. Connors was a time when there was more than adequate funding being given to form writing programs and also a time when rhetoric and composition really began to take off as a discipline with the formation of several graduate programs (xiii). Lunsford and Ede describe this time as one of “possibility” for those entering the field, but, they are careful to note that “that sense of possibility did not necessarily translate into a clear agenda for theory and practice” (xiii). They admit that the idea of researching the historical tradition of rhetoric in America might seem strange to us now (a no-brainer—something that any discipline might want to do in order to learn from its history), but that was not the case when Connors began poking around in 19th century rhetoric with “The Rise and Fall of the Modes of Discourse” as a result in 1981 (xiii). Essentially, Lunsford and Ede pinpoint two reoccurring themes in his work: 1. Connors was “convinced that contemporary rhetoric on both writing and the teaching of writing needed to be firmly grounded in the rhetorical tradition” (xiv); and 2. He “believed that historical studies could play a critical role in establishing and maintaining this connection” (xiv). In his early work, Connors claimed a realist/empirical lens as a historian (as well as a love for “archival scholarship”), which positioned him as a materialist, the kind of historian who liked to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty in the stuff of history, even if the stuff in question was old textbooks and assignments stored away on some dusty library shelf (xv). With his mind on the past and his eye on the present, Connors tended to mix his realist approach to history with the concerns, theories, and pedagogies of the contemporary classroom. [Ede, Lisa and Andrea A. Lunsford, eds. Selected Essays of Robert J. Connors. New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2003.]
Connors was, in addition to a scholar and a historian, a short story writer, and, in the words of Pat Sullivan, “an ex-hippie, a shroomie, a Deadhead, a lifelong Democrat, a collector of underground comics, and apologist for the schmaltz-fest of professional wrestling, a Simpsons and Dilbert fan, an ardent biker” (qtd. in Lunsford and Ede 481).
Robert J. Connors died on June 22, 2000 in a motorcycle accident
Date of Upload
3/14/09