English Compositionism as Fraud and Failure

Academic Questions

Volumn 26, Issue 3, 2013, Pages 270-284

  Zorn, Jeffrey ^a  

^a SANTA CLARA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84883350156     PISSN: 08954852     EISSN: 19364709     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s12129-013-9368-1     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. Joseph Harris, A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1968 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1997), 90.
2. The reference at adrift" is to Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
3. See the four reviews in the February 2012 College Communication and Composition (vol. 63, no. 3), collectively depicting the book as methodologically unreliable but substantively correct about U.S. higher education, http://www.ncte.org/ library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/CCC/0633-feb2012/CCC0633Reviews.pdf. The interesting part is how the professional positions of these reviewers led to very different takes on Academically Adrift's significance; apparently the closer you are to teaching composition to bad writers, the more value you see in Arum and Roksa's insights.
4. "Higher" education, that is, as distinguished from "tertiary" education, which suggests an institutional continuation of secondary education without further expectation as to the intellectual level of the work assigned and done. For shameful misunderstanding of "tertiary education, " see Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education (University of Virginia Press, 2005), by William G. Bowen, Martin A. Kurzweil, and Eugene M. Tobin, for whom U.S. postsecondary education is successful just for the number of butts in the seats. Reading just a few paragraphs of typical undergraduate writing will temper anybody's enthusiasm for "tertiary" education, a.k.a. "College Lite. "
5. Janice M. Lauer, "Rhetoric and Composition, " in English Studies: An Introduction to the Disciplines, ed. Bruce McComiskey (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2006), 106-52. Further references to this work will be cited parenthetically within the text.
6. For a devastating critique of "Students' Right to Their Own Language, " see my "'Students' Right to Their Own Language': A Counter-Argument, " in the Fall 2010 Academic Questions (vol. 23, no. 3).
7. Evidence here is easy to come by, empirical and anecdotal alike. For the former, see results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the Scholastic Aptitude Test, the Graduate Record Examination, and, in particular, the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. Together, test results show this pattern: a lackluster situation in the 1950s and early 1960s worsened through the later 1960s and 1970s into the mid-1980s and then leveled off low. We produce a handful of excellent writers, many good writers, many more poor writers, and too many non-writers. The anecdotal reports reinforce these data. Especially telling are those from veteran college professors, human resource specialists, military recruiters, etc., in positions to see cohort after cohort of graduates arriving at their next station in life. The next of these informants to say anything good about the newer, more recent writing they have seen will be the first.
8. Gary Tate, "Empty Pedagogical Space and Silent Students, " in Left Margins: Cultural Studies and Composition Pedagogy, ed. Karen Fitts and Alan W. France (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 270.
9. Cited in Alison Schneider, "Bad Blood in the English Department: The Rift between Composition and Literature, " Chronicle of Higher Education, February 13, 1998, A-14.
10. Clara Juncker, "Writing (with) Cixous, " College English 50, no. 4 (April 1988): 431.
11. Dale Bauer, "The Other F-Word: Feminist in the Classroom, " College English 52, no. 4 (April 1990): 389. I mention College English as the source of these quotes to indicate the growing interaction in this period between the literature and composition-rhetoric sectors of English department work. The dynamic was this: Literature welcomed composition upon seeing compositionism mirror its own "Theory" preoccupations and leadership structure. What transpired at eye level was the further descent of writing curriculum and classroom pedagogy into blathering chaos.
12. The heuristic value of feminist composition theory lies in its complete dissociation from classroom engagement and observation. The actual gender problem in English education is that boys and young men are so far behind girls and young women. One would never get to a need for feminist theorizing and invective from classroom engagement or observation, or from analysis of test results. This suggests forcefully the general situation: "Composition theory" is imposed on practice rather than flowing organically out of it. The strongest impetus for composition theorizing unquestionably has been the placement of composition instruction inside English departments dominated by professors of literary theory. To attain professional status at the level of the Derrida-Irigaray spewers, an ambitious compositionist had to spew some Derrida or Irigaray. This remains a powerful reason to dissociate composition and literature.
13. See Nordquist's definition of "current-traditional rhetoric" at "Grammar and Composition Rhetoric, " About. com, http://grammar.about.com/od/c/g/curtradrheterm.htm.
14. Richard Fulkerson, "Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, " College Composition and Communication 56, no. 4 (June 2005): 654-87.
15. For an especially useful critique of social constructionism, see Mark Bauerlein, "Social Constructionism: Philosophy for the Academic Workplace, " Partisan Review (Spring 2001): 228-41.
16. Sondra Perl's "The Composing Process of Unskilled College Writers" (December 1979) might be the single most influential article ever published in Research in the Teaching of English, and so nowhere else can the detriments of reifying Process be pointed out to greater effect. One reads the prose of Perl's subject Tony and cannot begin to see its bad parts (which are very bad) as either caused by flaws in his writing process or amenable to remediation by way of process instruction. Perl cannot see (or, for political reasons, chooses not to admit) that Tony used much the same composing process as every student at CCNY and elsewhere who would write a much better paper on the same topic. No question, the better writer will pre-write and plan somewhat differently from Tony, making more or fewer stops along the way to completing a draft. Perhaps the better writer composes in the dorm room at night while Tony writes in the library mid-afternoon. Perhaps one or the other writes the paper in longhand before keyboarding it. Perhaps one or the other reads or gets a friend to read the piece aloud at every stopping-point. We can study these and countless other process variables, and in the end almost all the differences in the quality of the essays will remain unaccounted for. Thomas Jefferson, Winston Churchill, and Ernest Hemingway all wrote standing up: Does anyone imagine for a moment that Tony would even inch toward becoming a writer in their league if he stood instead of sat as he drafted his threadbare, simplistic thoughts?
17. Jacqueline Jones Royster, forward to Composition Theory for the Postmodern Classroom, ed. Gary A. Olson and Sidney I. Dobrin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), xi-xiii. Further references to this work will be cited parenthetically within the text.
18. Lauer, "Rhetoric and Composition, " 130.
19. Bizzell's Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992) collects previously published articles and offers a new, very revealing introduction. Further references to this material will be cited parenthetically within the text.
20. Bizzell admitted this in 2009. Catch, though, the tone of her concession: "I tended to elide important differences here and once, Heaven forgive me, actually wrote these words, 'Basic writers are very much like Freire's peasants.' Well, no they weren't, but Freire's ideas did suggest. " No. Once we appreciate that Freire spoke about entirely different people in entirely different situations, his ideas will resonate only with New-New Left educator-propagandists desperate for theoretical backing. "Opinion: Composition Studies Saves the World!" College English 72, no. 2 (November 2009): 177.
21. Anne Curzan, "Says Who? Teaching and Questioning the Rules of Grammar, " PMLA 124, no. 3 (2009): 871.
22. Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle, "Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning 'First-Year Composition' as 'Introduction to Writing Studies,'" College Composition and Communication 20, no. 4 (June 2007): 559.
23. Kathleen Yancey reports a total of some 739 departments of English, and David Laurence suggests the number may be even higher. " "Disciplinarity, Divorce, and the Displacement of Labor Issues: Rereading Histories of Composition and Literature, " College Composition and Communication 62, no. 1 (September 2010): 55. The trend is toward "divorce, " which would be welcome if compositionism weren't so out of it.
24. For the clearest example of bizarre, over-the-top raving, see Tom Fox, Defending Access: A Critique of Standards in Higher Education (Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 1999), esp. 61-70.
25. See, for instance, Caroline Pari, "Resisting Assimilation, " in Critical Literacy in Action, ed. Ira Shor and Caroline Pari (Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 1999), 103-25. Working with community college students in New York City, mostly recent immigrant and native-born students of color, Pari sets out to help them avoid "cultural erasure, " i.e., giving up their racial and/or class identity as they go through college. In class, Pari refuses to let her students say they are "just Americans" and get on with improving their English skills. She instead follows "a recent tradition in composition studies that. encourages [students] to develop their own language when faced with the struggle with academic discourse" (123-24). She is thrilled when her students "showed an increased resistance to assimilation" and in particular when her student Maria "wrote parts of her cultural identity essay in Spanish and then translated for me. " Pari is pleased as punch with Maria telling her, "[W]hen I'm with my friends, I try to even eliminate English totally" (117).
26. William M. Chace, "The Decline of the English Department, " American Scholar (Autumn 2009): 42. Further references to this work will be cited parenthetically within the text.