Bibliographic Research in Composition Studies. Vicki Byard

      1 Directions to the Parlor: The Need for a Guide to Scholarship in Composition Studies

      The publisher of this book, Parlor Press, derives its name from a frequently quoted passage by theorist Kenneth Burke, a passage especially relevant to this text’s mission of guiding readers to a discipline’s scholarship:

      Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. (110–11)

      Although Burke used this metaphor to describe the drama of human existence—you enter the parlor at your birth, mature to participate in the “unending conversation” of civilization, and then exit the parlor upon your death—the passage is sometimes quoted in composition scholarship as an apt description of how knowledge is constructed in an academic discipline. When a student or other newcomer first encounters a discipline, she finds its scholars engaged in an intense conversation that has been evolving since the discipline’s inception. If the student is intrigued by the conversation taking place, she listens—she studies it—until she is informed enough to join the conversation herself as a publishing scholar. Consistent with Burke’s metaphor, the conversation of a discipline—its scholarship—continues beyond any one individual’s participation.

      Gary Olson is one composition specialist who has written explicitly about the correlation between an ongoing conversation and scholarship in composition studies. In his essay “Publishing Scholarship in Rhetoric and Composition: Joining the Conversation,” Olson depicts a scene quite similar to Burke’s metaphor of a parlor conversation:

      [I]magine a faculty cocktail party in which various colleagues and their spouses are standing in groups sipping cocktails and engaging in intimate, sometimes passionate discussions. After freshening your cocktail, you approach several people discussing the influence of postmodern theory on composition pedagogy. Obviously, it would be considered rude to jump immediately into the conversation that had been going on before you arrived. Basic etiquette dictates that you join the group, quietly listen to what is being said, and develop a sense of the larger conversation—both its tone and content—before you begin to make a contribution.

Скачать книгу