The Nature of English composition

Andrea A. Lunsford THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

After a particularly difficult passage in A Rhetoric of Motives, Kenneth Burke says "Let us try again. A direct hit is not likely here. The best one can do is to try different approaches toward the same center, whenever the opportunity arises" (137). In spite of its militaristic language, I've thought of this passage often as I began work on this essay, for it represents, for me, just the kind of circling around and trying again that Burke's words invoke. The center I am circling around is composition studies, the subject of this book, and over the past several years I've taken several approaches to that center, first in essays co-authored with Janice Lauer ( "The Place of Rhetoric and Composition in Doctoral Studies") and Cheryl Glenn ( "Rhetorical Theory and the Teaching of Writing") and more recently in my Chair's address to the 1989 CCCC Convention ("Composing Ourselves") and in an essay for MLA's third edition of Introduction to Scholarship ( "Rhetoric and Composition"). Not until Erika Lindemann and Gary Tate invited me to contribute this essay to their volume, however, did I recognize the "circling around" I've been doing as such. Why, then, continue this circling, this series of approaches to the center, the '"nature" of composition studies?

I do so both for compelling personal and professional reasons, because I wish to understand, as contextually as possible, why I do what I do (rather in the manner of the series of essays Harper's published by celebrated writers on "Why I live where I live"); where our field comes from, what its typical motives and gestures are; and, perhaps most important, how its present moment might best be described. I wish to begin with the personal, however, as a way of emphasizing that the answers I give to the questions just enumerated necessarily constitute a story, a personal narrative that inevitably grows out of my own experiences, and further, that calls into question the essentializing or totalizing implications of "The Nature" of composition studies. Insofar as English composition has a "nature," it is available to us only in multeity, in a multitude of stories, of different approaches.

Charles Moran closes this volume with one such story, and indeed every essay in this volume might be subtitled '"A Life in the Profession." The story of my life in the profession began, it now seems to me, the day I picked up Edward P. J. Corbett Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, hot off the presses in 1971. Though I'd been teaching for several years, it was Corbett's book that actually invited me into a community, that helped me to begin to imagine what a life in the profession of English composition might become. So I want to remark the importance of invitations in our lives and to stress the ways in which invitations of a particular kind stand for me as a metonymic representation of the nature of composition studies.

To do so of course is to be local and specific, to point to particular invitations, and simply writing these words calls up two such invitations that help me account for why I do what I do, for what English composition is" for me. The first occurred in 1976. I was a graduate student working to help create a viable basic writing program. We needed help, so I screwed up my courage and called Mina Shaughnessy. She was deeply involved in completing Errors and Expectations and was, as I later learned, not in good health. I had hoped for a phone interview or, at most, perhaps a meeting with her at a conference. "Oh no," she said, in that rich voice that was itself so inviting, "I'll come to help. I'll do whatever I can." And come she did, giving us two days of her energy and insight, always listening to us and our students, and always inviting us to imagine a field into existence. When we worried that many of our colleagues, particularly those working on traditional literary projects, didn't seem to understand what we were doing, why we were so interested in basic writing, much less why we valued it, Professor Shaughnessy said, "Don't worry about anything but your own work. Make it strong and rigorous--and it will be exciting. Eventually one or two of those others will wonder what all the excitement is about and they'll come around to find out. They'll notice your attitude toward students and how it informs what you do. And slowly but surely your work will make its mark."

The second invitation I've referred to also came when I was a graduate student, at work on my dissertation. For part of that work, I needed to perform some fairly simple statistical maneuvers, but I was woefully unprepared to do so and frustrated by my lack of fluency in this new language. Such was my frustration and sense of being out of it (probably defining characteristics of dissertation writing) that I marched up to Lynn Quitman Troyka at a conference and asked if she would point me to some books or articles that would ease me in to the vocabulary of ttests and chi squares. "Oh," she said, having never before so much as set eyes on me, "why don't we just sit down right here and I'll get you started." Half an hour and three pages of diagrams and notes later, she had explained not only how to conduct the statistical tests I was interested in but also the reasons why I should or should not be using them and how they related to theoretical and pedagogical questions I was asking. In his 1988 Conference on College Composition and Communication Chair's address, David Bartholomae said that he thinks of CCCC as the organization that "has made work in composition possible." I wholeheartedly agree--particularly if we remember the importance of invitations to do that work, invitations like those offered by CCCC members Mina Shaughnessy and Lynn Troyka.

That I remember these two incidents so vividly is, of course, a mark of their importance in the story of my life in the profession. But they signify for me more than part of the rites de passage I underwent in joining a particular disciplinary community. First, they are characteristic of a particular time (the mid-1970s) and place (the CCCC community), and, more important, of two extraordinary women. They also, however, suggest what I have taken to be the inviting nature of composition studies. As I think of Mina Shaughnessy and Lynn Troyka, I think of how open and welcoming they were, of how carefully they listened to my tentative voice, my only partially articulated questions. I think also of their passionate engagement with writing as a subject of theoretical and practical inquiry and their equally passionate engagement with learners. A discipline with these values at its center was one I very much wanted to join--or to help create.

I do not wish through this emphasis on invitations to dismiss or ignore the very real conflicts within English composition over methodologies, over pedagogical strategies, over theoretical constructs. These and other areas of conflict, which are explored by many essays in this volume, animate English composition and account in large measure for the liveliness of its intellectual debate. But these conflicts are so vigorous in my opinion precisely because they are in service of what I take to be fairly widespread commitments in the field, commitments epitomized by the "invitings" described above: to listen to the voices of others; to map the theoretical and practical worlds of writing; to link the scholarly and the pedagogical and the practical at every turn; and to make students and learning the heart of our endeavors.

I'd like to suggest that these characteristics can be read into the history of composition studies, that they account in part not only for why I do what I do but for where this field comes from, for some of the soil in which its roots first took hold and grew. As a field, English composition is an American phenomenon, growing up in the nineteenth century in parallel with several significant educational moves (see, e.g., Berlin, Miller, Homer). Of all those elements in nineteenth-century America I might conceivably focus on here, three seem particularly important for the purposes of this essay. The first is the establishment of the land-grant universities following The Morrill Act of July 2, 1862, designating public lands "equal to thirty thousand acres for each senator and representative in Congress to which the States are respectively entitled by the apportionment under the census of 1860." The growth of these universities represents an egalitarian turn in American higher education, a move to offer such education to those preparing to join American society through venues other than the bar, the pulpit, or the forum, venues such as agriculture, engineering, and other "mechanic" arts and sciences. The land-grant universities welcomed a much broader spectrum of the American public than had heretofore had access to higher education, and these students were by and large untrained in Latin and Greek--the traditional languages of the Academy. As the vernacular slowly became the language of choice in all universities, instruction in composition emerged as a powerful means of immersing students in the skillful use of English, at least partially in the belief that the "right and proper" use of the English language was requisite to participation in the intellectual and economic life of the republic. As Winifred Homer has demonstrated, this egalitarian turn in America partially reflects the Scottish influence provided by the example of The Mechanics' Institutes and other Scottish systems of providing free or relatively inexpensive education and balanced to some degree the elitist British (and later German) influences on American institutions of higher learning.

The history of English composition parallels another important nineteenth-century phenomenon, the move from oral instruction (and oral participation in society) to the technologies of writing. Michael Halloran and Greg Clark have demonstrated the ways in which orality functioned in our early colleges, and both Jacques Derrida and Susan Miller have shown how an oral paradigm persisted long after writing became the primary mode of communication. Of course, writing had long been part of every student's educational experience; learners ordinarily copied out entire courses of lectures as dictated by their professors. But technological developments in the nineteenth century served to make writing so instrumental to higher education, so ubiquitous, that it, like the air we breathe, was hardly noticeable.

The telegram ( 1864), for instance, made publication of newspaper stories and commitment of text to print easier and more timely, while the typewriter ( 1868), hailed as a modern miracle, led to increased standardization as well as to much easier production of written texts. Other inventions, including the mechanical pencil ( 1822), efficient metal pen points ( 1940), fountain pens ( 1850), and the attached eraser ( 1858), not to mention the availability of cheap durable paper, constitute material changes in the production of discourse that paralleled and aided the increasing move to writing as the primary technology in colleges. And with that technology came the development of composition studies. While scholars such as Elizabeth Eisenstein have analyzed what Raymond Williams calls the "very complex interaction" between technological inventions and "social needs, purposes, and practices" ( Television: Technology and Cultural Form14-15), to date the story of technology and English composition in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America has not been fully told (though see Elizabeth Larsen's dissertation study, which argues that contemporary composing process theory was not a serious possibility until the mid-nineteenth century). Nevertheless, it seems clear that the more efficient, less expensive, and available materials for writing went hand in hand with the growing importance of writing in the new colleges. And the growing numbers of students entering these colleges (the student population more than doubled in the last decades of the century) put increasing pressure on the schools to teach composition.

As the doors to the academy began to open and technological change continued apace, traditionally marginalized groups increasingly sought access to higher education. The nineteenth century saw particularly strong efforts on the part of African-Americans and women of all backgrounds to enter the academy in larger and larger numbers. In fact, Robert Connors has argued that the move from oral to written discourse is at least partially the result of women's entry into colleges and universities. The connection between silence and "woman's place" is of very long standing in the Western tradition, and it was particularly unseemly for women to speak in public. Writing, Connors argues, was more distanced and hence more acceptable ("Feminization"). Whether or not such a causal connection holds, however, it seems probable that the increasing diversity of the student population was inevitably accompanied by linguistic diversity. If students from widely varying backgrounds were coming to college (whether the colleges wanted them there or not) someone had to offer instruction in the linguistic ways of the academy. This someone was increasingly the teacher of composition.

Thus, while it is certainly possible to trace roots of English composition as far back as the fifth century B.C., it seems to me more pertinent to see our discipline as growing most directly out of nineteenth-century American soil and to see its focus on contextualized written texts--how they come to be and how they are interpreted--as related to material and technological changes and to the move toward increased democratization of education that occurred between 1820 and 1900, moves that I think served as compelling invitations to the development of composition studies.

Readers will no doubt have noted the ways in which this brief excursion into the origins of the field of English composition echoes to some extent my personal stories of invitation: conditions in the nineteenth century invited English composition to emerge just as conditions in the 1970s invited me to join the field, and perhaps just as conditions in the 1990s are inviting you to do so today.

What are these conditions that characterize the present moment in composition and hence help account for the nature of the field? Do these conditions offer strong reasons for remaining in the field as well as for joining it? As we move toward the twenty-first century, I believe we find ourselves at a moment most receptive to English composition for reasons I will sketch in here, but this moment is not without its challenges and dangers.

One condition that serves as a strong current invitation to English composition is the growing consensus among most disciplines that our realities and systems of knowing are not reflections or givens that are discovered ready made but rather are themselves composed (or constructed, to use the term of choice), that it is only by actively composing our worlds that we can know them. This view of reality as a series of composed texts and of composing or constructing as the acts of bringing those realities to consciousness is, quite simply, the heart of composition studies. As a field, we traditionally ask questions about texts, readers, writers, and contexts--and about the dynamic relation among them through which multiplicities meanings or realities are constructed. Thus English composition views composing not as a series of discrete skills or a package of processes to be practiced but as the very way we constitute and know our worlds. As such, English composition stands as a discipline of central importance in a post-modern era ( Schilb and Harkin).

Such a position leads English composition to look well beyond its own borders and to challenge divisions between disciplines, between genres, and between media. Thus a scholar of composition may draw on anthropology, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, literary theory, neurobiology, or other disciplines in studying the creation and dissemination of written texts. The blurring of disciplinary boundaries raises a number of difficulties for graduate students and scholars in the field, however. How can any one person master the discourses of multiple fields? How viable and valid is the use of one discipline's methodology transferred to another field? While the challenges of transdisciplinary work loom large (see, e.g., Stanley Fish, who in "Being Interdisciplinary Is So Very Hard to Do," argues that such work is impossible), the questions asked by scholars in English composition demand a constant pushing against disciplinary barriers, a constant invitation to other fields to add insights and help build satisfactory answers to our questions.

Closely related to genres are the media through which they are realized, and here once again English compositionaddresses the ways in which divisions between speaking, writing, reading, and listening no longer hold. Most obvious, perhaps, is the effect of television, video, and other electronic media: on television, for example, a president addresses the nation orally but works from a written text that is "read" from a monitor and "read" as well by listeners at home who may be recording, taping, or transcribing. Like the blurring between disciplines and between genres, the blurring between and among the media of communication both characterizes the work of English compositionand offers exciting possibilities for future research.

A third condition characterizing the current moment in English compositionis the move beyond the classroom or the academy to study the use of writing in the home, in the community, and in the workplace, to trace the use of language arts in both private and public spheres. As a field, English compositionseems intent on pressing beyond campus boundaries, breaking down the walls of the ivory tower, bridging the surrounding moat, and establishing conversation in the public square. Of the many works that illustrate this move in composition studies, readers of this essay might best look to Mike Rose Lives on the Boundary, a demonstration of how schooling can be connected to community action, to the work of Shirley Brice Heath, and to essays in The Right to Literacy that focus on scenes of language learning outside the academy. One outcome of work on The Right to Literacy has been a follow-up conference on "The Responsibilities for Literacy" held in Pittsburgh in September 1990. This conference featured speakers and panelists from the United Auto Workers, U.S. Steel, The National Alliance for Business, Levi Strauss, The United States Department of Education, and numerous local and state literacy programs talking to and with teachers of composition about ways of breaking down the barriers between school, home, community, and workplace.

The conditions I have described as characterizing the present moment in composition studies--a focus on the constructed or composed quality of all experience, of all texts; the pressing against disciplinary, genre, and media boundaries; the move to connect the academy to other forums in the private and public space--are all movements beyond the center, all voyages outward, all inviting, I believe, a broad definition of literacy or literacies as the business composition scholars must be about. At the very nexus of composition studies' terministic screen ( Burke, Language as Symbolic Action), literacy encompasses highly theoretical concerns over the relationship among thought, language, and action; historical concerns over the organization and development of literacy; and pragmatic concerns over how literate behaviors are nurtured and practiced. The study of literacy, like English composition itself, constantly moves outward, inevitably shading theory into pedagogy, research into practice, cutting across lines of class, age, race, and gender, reaching out to all. But for these very reasons, the study of literacy and the field of English composition inevitably raise complex political and ethical questions: how will literacy be defined and measured? Who will have access to full and multiple literacies? Who will be denied? What are the responsibilities of literacy? Who among us is responsible for literacy?

During the last twenty-five years, scholars in English composition have created an intellectual space in which to study these questions and their accompanying scenes of literacy and literate behaviors. As I have attempted to argue in this brief essay, I see this space, this "nature" of composition studies, as large and loosely bounded, informed by crossdisciplinary, trans-institutional, multiply mediated, multi-genred, multivoiced, and radically democratic principles. This space is, I also believe, powerfully inviting, but its invitations carry dangers as well. First is the danger that the field will undertheorize the questions of literacy outlined above by looking for stable or monolithic answers or by accepting quick-fix cures for the literacy woes that surround us. Even more important, we may fail to meet the challenge of our own best gestures, may become theorizers cut off from possibilities for effective public action.