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Albert Raymond Kitzhaber was born in 1915 and took his MA in 1941. He served in the European Theatre in World War II, returning to work toward his Ph.D. at the University of Washington, and between 1950 and 1953 he researched and wrote his dissertation. Rhetoric in American Colleges 1850-1900 was written under the direction of Porter G. Perrin, who had himself written a dissertation in 1936 on eighteenthcentury American rhetoric. ( Perrin, who is now almost forgotten, was one of the great figures of composition teaching in America between 1925 and 1960.) Under Perrin's careful scholarly guidance, Kitzhaber assembled an imposing mass of research materials in nineteenth-century rhetoric and composition, read through and mastered all of it, and then in his writing analyzed and discussed those lost, pivotal fifty years, 1850 to 1900, in a style marked by understated elegance and brilliant synthesis. Kitzhaber's tone was never one of disinterested scholarship; he looked about him at the serious problems besetting the teaching of writing and sought to trace them to their sources in the theory and practice of post-Civil War rhetoric teachers. "The years from 1850 to 1900 cannot in any sense be called a great period in the history of rhetoric," wrote Kitzhaber. "Composition teaching became, in a very real sense, drudgery of the worst sort, unenlivened by any genuine belief in its value, shackled by an unrealistic theory of writing, and so debased in esteem that men of ability were unwilling to identify themselves with it permanently" (351). He saw his task as providing the necessary information to change the conditions he saw around him: "If a teacher is to have any perspective on his subject, he must know the tradition that lies behind it, know the place of himself and his times in the tradition, and, through this knowledge, be able to put a proper value on new developments in his subject as they appear" (352). Rhetoric in American Colleges can be coruscating; it is often bitterly critical. With Kitzhaber comes the tendency, seen in much of the later historical work that used his dissertation as a basis, to create heroes and villains out of figures in the history of composition. Kitzhaber's heroes--Fred Newton Scott, Gertrude Buck, John Genung--became the heroes of such second-generation historians as Donald Stewart and James Berlin; his villains--primarily Adams S. Hill and the "Harvard crowd"--became our villains. And for all later historians of composition, Kitzhaber became "the lion in the road": we could not go around him without dealing with his work. That work--its amazing assembly of sources without any previous bibliographic help, its informed analysis of destructive ideas and methods in composition teaching, its attractive division of our forebears into competing camps, and its narrative of the tragic victory of the mechanistic, form-obsessed "bad guys" who created our own troubled period-influenced in ways great and small everything that followed it in composition history. It's not hyperbolic to state that with Kitzhaber's dissertation the history of English compositiongained its first really respectable work--and then ended for a quarter-century. Rhetoric in American Colleges 18501900 was never published. It remained an underground classic available only from University Microfilms, passed around in samizdat Xerox copies by the small group of people interested in composition history. Kitzhaber went on to a distinguished career at Dartmouth and the University of Oregon, where he continued to work in English compositionand to fight for defensible teaching methods that eschewed both useless traditions and the trendy pedagogical fads of the 1950s and 1960s. And the history of composition in American colleges remained a field little examined. There were, of course, educational histories that touched on composition in college, and a few biographies of figures like Harvard's Barrett Wendell who had also made literary contributions. By and large, however, Kitzhaber's ground-breaking dissertation was not followed up--even by him--during the 1950s and 1960s. During these years, of course, the general field of English compositionwas building itself. Like Whitman's spider, it threw out thread after thread to other disciplines, hoping that some would catch. The primary work during these years was recuperation of the rhetorical tradition, from classical rhetoric onward, and what Janice Lauer calls "analogical-theoretical research," which makes claims for English compositionon the basis of its similarities to other more developed fields, of which the favorites were linguistics and psychology. The technologies of empirical research in composition were re-examined and tuned up, and an improved experimental tradition began. But as the field was creating itself, historical research was a very minor part of it.
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