Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays

321 Pages·1998·21.091 MB·English

by  Sharon Crowley

COMPOSITION IN THE UNIVERSITY
PITTSBURGH SERIES IN COMPOSITION, LITERACY, AND CULTURE
David Bartholornae and Jean Ferguson Carr. Editors
COMPOSITION IN THE UNIVERSITY
+>-Historical and Polemical Essays
SHARON CROWLEY
University of Pittsburgh Press
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa. 1)261
Copyright © 1998, University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
109 8 7 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crowley, Sharon, 1943-
p. em. - (Pittsburgh series in composition, literacy, and
culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8229-4056-6 (acid-free paper). - ISBN 0-8229-5660-8 (pbk. :
acid-free paper)
I. English language-Rhetoric-Study and teaching-United States
History. 2. English philology-Study and teaching (Higher)-United
States-History. 3. Education, Higher-United States-History.
I. Title. II. Series.
PE1405·U6C76 1998
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Earlier versions of four of these essays appeared in Pre/Text (1991);
Rhetoric, Cultural Studies, and Literacy, ed. John Frederick Reynolds
(Erlbaum I 995),jAC: AJournal of Composition Theory Ii, no. 2 (Spring
1995); Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change, ed. Lynn
Bloom, Donald Daiker, and Edward White, copyright © 1996 by the
Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University. Reprinted by permission
of the publisher.
FOR MY BRAVE SISTERS

CONTENTS
PREFACE IX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XI
Composition in the University
2 The Toad in the Garden 19
3 The Bourgeois Subject and the Demise of Rhetorical Education 30
4 The Invention of Freshman English 46
Literature and Composition:
Not Separate but Certainly Unequal 79
6 Terms of Employment: Rhetoric Slaves and Lesser Men 118
7 You Can't Write Writing:
Norman Foerster and the Battle Over Basic Skills at Iowa 132
8 Freshman English and War 155
9 Around 1971: The Emergence of Process Pedagogy 187
10 The Politics of Composition 215
II A Personal Essay on Freshman English 228
12 Composition's Ethic of Service, the Universal Requirement,
and the Discourse of Student Need 250
NOTES 267
WORKS CITED 279
INDEX 301

PREFACE
I have been a teacher of composition for over thirty years. I have been a
student of its history for almost that long. And yet I have an uneasy relation
with composition. Teaching composition is a rewarding and exciting job. Liv
ing with its situation in the university is something else altogether.
This is not an easy book to publish. I fear that its conclusions will be
marshaled as evidence by those who want to make universities into the kinds
of places they were in the 1960s, before all that antiwar stuff started up, of
course, when 95 percent of student bodies were white and when 60 percent
of students were men. Freshman English has a role to play in this proposed
makeover: the universally required introductory course will once again be
used as the gate to the university, as it has been, more often than not, during
its not altogether savory history. I do not think this is a good thing, for teach
ers, for students, or for the future of composition in the university. I risk
publishing a critique of the institutional foundation of composition at what is
perhaps an inauspicious cultural moment, because, as luck would have it, this
is an auspicious professional moment for those who teach composition in the
university. We now have an opportunity to decide whether our art and our
discipline will remain in thrall to attitudes about and uses of composition that
descend from an older, very different kind of university.
Many assertions in the text are supported by large and complex argu
ments that for continuity's sake I could not rehearse. I indicate that a detailed
argument supports something I have said by appending the name or names
of its author(s) between parentheses, like this: (O'Neill). This device refers
the reader to a source or sources, listed in the Works Cited, in which they can
find that argument. If a date or page numbers follow the name in parentheses,
that indicates a cite or other specific indebtedness.
Masculine pronouns predominate in this text. In its historical portions I
use men to mean "human beings," as did the men and women about whom I
IX