harmonious chaos.
4 Composition in 1977: The National Conversation
What might be done in response to all of these difficulties, all of this sense of crisis and controversy, all of this attention to the nation’s literacy woes? That was the problem that faced writing teachers and professionals struggling to develop the field of rhetoric and composition in 1977. There was no shortage of solutions proposed by departments of English that were using composition as a place to work out their own difficulties and that were in the midst of being both challenged and galvanized intellectually.
Old Time Religions: Traditionalism and Current Traditionalism
Not every proposed solution was innovative, of course. As you might expect from the counter-reformation voices we quoted in the previous chapter, some people prescribed a stiff dose of traditional medicines: a focus on the expository modes and/or on “ basic skills,” a Great Books curriculum, and other measures associated with what Richard Young in an essay published in 1978 dubbed “current-traditionalism” in composition.13 Young’s essay called attention to the resiliency of current-traditional pedagogy in the nation’s composition courses: the “emphasis on the composed product rather than the composing process; an analysis of discourse into description, narration, exposition, and argument; the strong concern with usage (syntax, spelling, punctuation) and style (economy, clarity, emphasis); the preoccupation with the informal essay and research paper” (31). Proceeding from a positivist, “windowpane” view toward language, current traditionalism depended on the publication of handbooks to reinforce its obsession with correctness and with static forms such as the five-paragraph essay and the research paper. To teachers of writing who lacked formal training and who were comfortable teaching as they had been taught themselves, current-traditionalism offered a formulaic approach to invention (if invention was considered at all), a linear view of composing that reduced revision pretty much to correction, and a “bottom-up,” not a “top down,” approach to instruction (i.e., instruction began with words, sentences, and then paragraphs, rather than proceeding from overall plans and strategies that then generate local sentences and paragraphs). Many teachers of current-traditionalism, dedicated and experienced or not, mainly understood themselves to be assignors and correctors of papers that tended to be required year after year; learning to compose was regarded largely as a matter of learning rules for logic and etiquette.14
For many teachers of writing, learning to write was also a matter of learning forms known as the expository modes. Advocates of the so-called modes—description, narration, exposition, and argumentation—could trace their instruction to the nineteenth-century work of Alexander Bain, who held that each mode had “its own subject matter, its own organizational forms, and its own language” (D’Angelo, Conceptual 115); descriptive writing organizes, narrative writing recounts, expository writing instructs, argumentative writing persuades. Although Robert Connors has claimed that Bain’s modal curriculum effectively died by the 1950s as exposition came to dominate the other modes (“Rise and Fall”), in fact it appears more accurate to us to say that the modes were simply being renegotiated—their number, their functions, their relationships. Any number of textbooks and readers and courses were still organized according to some version of the modes, and in those courses students were directed through a series of modal assignments, one after the next, that were illustrated in the readers. A description assignment might be followed by narration, comparison, analysis, classification, and definition—or some other combination might be offered. In other words, if exposition was gaining headway as the chief kind of mode, it was also generating its own kind of modal arrangements: static forms of one kind or another into which, according to current-traditional thinking, students were implored to pour information.
These current-traditional approaches to writing instruction were welcomed into many English departments in part because of the long history of New Criticism in those departments. After a text-based pedagogy for criticism was created by the publication of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry in 1938, John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism in 1941, and Rene Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature in 1942, many writing courses began to incorporate New Critical values. New Critical faith in the autonomy of art and artists, and New Critical respect for stylistic achievement, easily dovetailed with current traditionalism, which also eschewed politics and emphasized style; and New Critical regard for written artifacts over artistic processes or cultural and rhetorical contexts reinforced current-traditional pedagogical doctrine as well. New Critics walled off so-called “literary” (and hence “timeless”) discourses from everyday ones, insisting on distinguishing the special connotative beauty of literary language from matter-of-fact scientific denotation. New Critics quite literally gave rhetoric a bad name, regarding everyday discourses as beneath their consideration, and their disdain for what they regarded as ephemeral writing translated itself in many composition classes into attention to Great Works and Great Writers, as opposed to student writing and more popular and rhetorical culture. It is true that by 1977 the New Criticism was losing momentum, as we have indicated: close analyses of literary texts had become stale with every new microanalysis, and even Rene Wellek was seeing its shortcomings in the famous essay he was writing in 1977, “The New Criticism: Pros and Cons.” But New Criticism and current traditionalism continued to affect classroom practices well into the next decade—even as they affect classrooms today.
Indeed, at many colleges and universities during the 1970s the composition class comfortably doubled as an introduction to Great Ideas or to canonical literary texts that were part of an established literary canon that provided “content” for students to write about. A number of composition-and-literature textbooks accommodated these courses, as they had for decades (Crowley, Composition, chapter 5). If the courses did not always emphasize explicitly literary genres of poetry, drama, and fiction, then they often offered up an analogous “canon” of “artistic” nonfiction or an introduction to Great Ideas in the sciences, the arts, and the humanities that could generate material for student essays. The best-selling 1977 edition of The Norton Reader, for example, accommodated both approaches: it included familiar essays by people like E.B. White, Wallace Stegner, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Jefferson, James Thurber, Niccolo Machiavelli, Jacob Bronowski, Loren Eiseley, John Henry Newman, X. J. Kennedy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jonathan Swift, and George Orwell (“A Modest Proposal” and “Politics and the English Language” to be sure), along with 1960s-inspired items by Eldridge Cleaver, Dee Brown, George Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Toni Morrison; and it organized itself according to heady titles like History, Ethics, Human Nature, Education, Mind, Politics and Government, and Literature and the Arts. (For that matter, it offered a table of contents that permitted teachers to teach the expository modes from the book as well.) Current traditionalism in 1977 was fed by many other textbooks in the Norton tradition and many other handbooks in the Harbrace tradition: enthusiastic imitation followed imitation.
Process Pedagogies
But criticism of New Critical and current-traditional approaches to composition was coming from several sources, among them the proponents of two student-centered pedagogies with roots in the 1960s and in the social sciences: expressivism and cognitivism. Besides being mutually convinced of the relative autonomy of writers from social circumstances (still something of a given in the 1970s), both expressivists and cognitivists claimed to be fundamentally concerned with the “composing process” of writers: they therefore promoted what we now know as “process pedagogies.” But the two groups treated the composing process somewhat differently and expected different behaviors from student writers. Though there was actually considerable common ground between the two camps, in 1977 expressivist and cognitivist advocates of process were in fact competing for priority in the field and promoting different basic principles and pedagogical strategies.15
Expressivists, who during the 1960s had ridiculed traditional composition classrooms for promoting humdrum current-traditional formulas and a neutral voice that Ken Macrorie had dubbed “Engfish,” accommodated process pedagogies in the 1970s rather easily. Indeed, when back-to-basics advocates attacked personal voice pedagogies and the
