(19). Even as the “dominant ideas of society change,” Corbett argues that “the basic human passions and motivations are the same today as they were in Homer’s day” (19). As you’ll see in the chapters ahead, feminist scholars place great emphasis—whether recovering ancient rhetorical texts or addressing contemporary classrooms—on the importance of local contexts and attention to differences within them, thereby disrupting the idea of universal rhetorical strategies or human characteristics.
While ancient rhetorical practices were never widely adopted in the composition classroom, the study of rhetoric would continue to be a vital line of inquiry in the field—one that has often been privileged above composition as a “practical,” feminine classroom subject. For instance, in a survey Theresa Enos conducted in the 1980s on gender and publishing in Composition and Rhetoric, she found a split within “rhetoric” and “composition,” such that scholarship in rhetoric was associated with knowledge production (i.e., the territory of men), while scholarship in composition connoted a focus on pedagogy, and was therefore more open to women.
Beginning in the 1990s, however, feminist scholars began to challenge the notion of a “unified” rhetoric attributed solely to classical male figures and designated as the scholarly territory of male scholars. Feminist conceptions of rhetoric, or “rhetorica,” as Andrea A. Lunsford has dubbed this work, interrupt the “seamless narratives” of the rhetorical tradition, refusing to valorize “one, traditional, competitive, agonistic, and linear mode of rhetorical discourse” (6). Instead, Lunsford writes, feminist rhetoric makes room for multiplicity—for rhetorics—and for “dangerous moves” (often equated with the feminine) such as “breaking the silence, naming in personal terms, employing dialogics, recognizing and using the power of conversation, moving centripetally toward connections and valuing—indeed insisting upon—collaboration” (6). In this way, then, feminist rhetorics extended the texts that comprised (and were taught as) the “rhetorical tradition,” altered accepted rhetorical strategies, and expanded possibilities for writing instruction and practice.
For Writing and Discussion
1.Has education in rhetoric been part of your own learning experience? If so, how would you describe the way rhetoric was represented?
2.Doing a search on the Internet, take a look at several composition programs that espouse a rhetorical focus for their curriculum. In what ways does the program reclaim classical rhetoric? In what ways does it disrupt it or move beyond it?
The Process Paradigm: Composition as a Science
Because the humanities are often deemed “soft” (or feminine) in relation to the “hard” sciences, one way English studies has sought to legitimize itself as a discipline is to claim connections to science. Within literary studies, we can see an example of this during the 1940s and 1950s when New Criticism flourished. New Criticism involved examining the text as an isolated artifact—rather than connecting it to the author’s biography or historical moment, as was the established practice at the time—and then analyzing it using a technical, field-specific vocabulary.
In order to rewrite its central identity as a discipline, and not merely a service course, composition scholars also sought scientific affiliation by locating a subject that could be scientifically studied: the writing process. For some narrators of composition’s history, then, the field’s origins as a discipline began with its research focus.
One example of composition’s efforts to achieve scientific status came in 1961 when NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) created an ad hoc committee to prepare a “scientifically based report” on the status of knowledge in the teaching and learning of composition. In so doing, the committee developed criteria for what counted as research that made “genuine contributions to knowledge”: research that studied the process of written instruction using scientific methods with the goal of improving composition teaching (North, “Death” 198). The resulting document, Research in Written Composition, by Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer, served as what Stephen M. North calls the “charter of modern Composition” (Making 17). The book insists that teaching-based inquiry needs to be replaced with scientific methodology. As the text states:
the field as a whole is laced with dreams, prejudices and makeshift operations. Not enough investigators are really informing themselves about the process and results of previous research before embarking on their own. Too few of them conduct pilot experiments and validate their measuring instruments before undertaking an investigation. [. . .] And far too few of those who have conducted an initial piece of research follow it with further exploration or replicate the investigations of others. (5)
Teachers, then, were replaced by “investigators” as the central agents of the field. Knowledge derived from classroom experience was replaced with the stuff of science—pilot experiments, measuring instruments, and replicated studies.
While this emphasis on scientific approaches did allow Composition Studies to advance its status as a discipline and gain legitimacy in and outside of English studies, it also deepened the fracture between largely male researchers who studied composition and female teachers who practiced it in the classroom with students. Consequently, a top-down dynamic was created where male researchers produced scholarship that directed female teachers about how best to teach. In the decades that followed, the number of women hired in tenure-track (research) positions in composition would continue to grow, but a divide remains between those who teach the bulk of composition courses and those who conduct research—a split that feminist scholars, among others, continue to critique and challenge.
Finally, the emphasis on science limited the definition of what counts as legitimate “knowledge,” a question that is central to the feminist project. While composition scholarship certainly diversified over time in both its subjects of study—moving far beyond how to teach first-year composition—and in the form its research assumes, the privileging of seemingly “objective” and quantitative research in the university looms large, even today. One such consequence of this hierarchy is that scholarship focused on teaching is often deemed “soft” or less rigorous than other forms of research. For this reason, it remains an ongoing part of the feminist project to challenge what kind of and whose knowledge we privilege in order to make room for new voices, perspectives, and subjects.
For Writing and Discussion
1.What evidence do you see in the academy that demonstrates the privileging of scientific knowledge? What evidence do you see where other forms of knowledge have successfully challenged the limitations of science?
2.In what ways might scientific approaches to work in fields like English studies serve us? In what ways does it limit us?
Looking Ahead
As this glimpse into the competing origin stories of Composition Studies shows, the field has long sought to revise the status that links it to remediation and feminization. In establishing disciplinary and pedagogical agency, however, the field has sometimes claimed origins that exclude or marginalize feminist knowledges. For this reason, feminist teachers and scholars have had to regularly disrupt, challenge, and offer alternatives to the field’s efforts to establish disciplinarity. In the chapters ahead, I provide an overview of feminist contributions to Composition and Rhetoric, which both revise these origin stories and offer a more expansive and inclusive view of how we understand writers and rhetors, writing and rhetoric, and teaching and learning in the field.
In the first section of the book, Chapters 2 and 3, I highlight feminist scholars’ efforts to alter the rhetorical tradition, described in the second origin story above. While feminist revisions of the rhetorical tradition emerged later, chronologically, than feminist contributions to the composition classroom, I begin with a look at “rhetorica” because, as you’ll see, the recovered rhetorics of women from across centuries show approaches, knowledges, and values upon which feminists in Rhetoric
