Robert J. Connors UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE English compositionis both the oldest and the newest of the humanities, and our gradual realization of this dual nature is probably the reason for the growing importance of historical study in composition. Traditionally melioristic and oriented toward a beckoning future, composition scholars are realizing that the future can most fruitfully be studied with a knowledge of more than a century's experience in teaching and studying writing. We may not always be able to claim that we see far because we stand on the shoulders of giants; we do, however, stand on the shoulders of thousands of good-willed teachers and writers surprisingly like us, who faced in 1870 or 1930 problems amazingly similar to those we confront each time we enter the classroom. Listening carefully, those of us who have begun to try to hear their voices have found much there we can learn from. Impatient dismissal of the past was a hallmark of our field's early years, and as we mature as a discipline, we will need to draw more and more deeply on the experience of the teachers who came before us. Only in such a context can we discern useful from harmful paths. This essay will be about our development and current state as historians of composition teaching and composition studies.

Rhetorical History and Composition History

We need at the beginning to understand that "history of composition" is not a sui generis subfield of composition studies. Like English compositionitself, history of composition is a branch of the larger field of rhetorical studies, which has existed for over 2000 years. Though composition emerged from rhetoric, there is no sense in which we can really say that "rhetoric" ended and "composition" began on any certain date. As James J. Murphy recent collection A Short History of Writing Instruction has shown, instruction in the composition of discourse has always been a part of rhetorical pedagogy. The special field of written rhetoric, which came to be called "composition," grew during the nineteenth century out of the older and more accepted practice and teaching of oral rhetoric, which we can trace in considerable detail all the way back to 500 B.C. The history of composition in rhetorical scholarship has, however, been problematical until recently. Rhetorical history as a scholarly field has existed for nearly as long as rhetoric itself; rhetoricians have always seemed to feel it important to honor or argue with their forebears. All rhetorical writings contain elements of history, and rhetorical history has thus been remarkably well preserved and documented. Even so, to someone reading the standard modern histories of rhetoric or anthologies of important works, there is a sense of inexplicable hiatus after the eighteenth century. A standard rhetorical history text like Golden, Berquist, and Coleman The Rhetoric of Western Thought gives a good example. In that book, the history of oral discourse begins with Corax and Gorgias in ancient Greece, proceeds through Hellenic and Roman rhetoric and into patristic and medieval works. With the Renaissance we read of a great burst of neoclassical and Ramist activity, all well documented, and then the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries see a tremendous empiricist revolution in rhetoric, culminating between 1776 and 1828 in the ground-breaking works of George Campbell, Hugh Blair, and Richard Whately. And then, after Whately in 1828, rhetoric as described in these books falls off the edge of the earth. The traditional rhetorical histories end abruptly with Whately, and the rest of the nineteenth century is an echoing tomb. The story picks up again in the 1920s, with I. A. Richards and Kenneth Burke, and from there we hum along merrily through modern to contemporary oral rhetoric, now usually called speech communications. What we see in these books is an intentional excision of a hundred years of rhetorical history, a wiping out of most of the nineteenth century as if it had never existed. This historical void, which for most of the twentieth century left written rhetoric without a history, is the unfortunate result of the rise of departmentalization in American universities. In early American colleges, oral rhetoric and writing were usually taught by the same generalist professor. There were no academic departments. After the Civil War, however, when scholars began traveling to Germany and bringing back the ideas that would create modern American higher education, the organization of the university into departments of scholars studying similar phenomena seemed natural. Modern English departments appeared quickly, teaching philology, literature, and composition. The older field of oral rhetoric, however, having no Germanic scholarly pedigree, never found a comfortable home in English. In 1914, rhetoric teachers, discouraged by their inferior status in English, left the National Council of Teachers of English to form the National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking, which became the Speech Communication Association--and to form their own separate Departments of Speech. It was in these Speech departments that most of the serious scholarship in rhetorical history has been done in this century. Speech department scholars defined themselves (naturally, and often polemically) by their interest in oral discourse, and thus we shouldn't be surprised to see a clouding or submergence of the history of written rhetoric in their work. Speech department historians begat histories of an oral rhetoric that seemed to close down or disappear as soon as rhetorical work shifted primarily to written composition in the early nineteenth century. They begin coverage again with the rise of Speech departments as scholarly institutions, creating a new college-based discipline and theory of speech communication. Like literature, composition was seen as an "English concern," and was thus no part of rhetorical history. So high and frowning were departmental walls that it seemed not to matter that most nineteenth-century composition textbooks had "rhetoric" in their titles somewhere, or that their authors clearly saw themselves within the rhetorical tradition. For Speech scholars, rhetoric was oral discourse or it did not exist. But what of English departments? With composition being taught to great numbers in English, with so many renowned scholars in English from Francis James Child onward, why was no history of compositionrhetoric written? The answer is, sadly, obvious to anyone conversant with the history of English departments. nglish departments have always been two-tier departments, with the teaching and theorizing about literature given more status and better conditions than the teaching of composition. There was little interest in theorizing about composition or analyzing its history among the burgeoning group of literary scholars, philologists, and critics that controlled English departments after 1895. As the MLA was coalescing and scholars were working to create the organization and bibliographical tools that would result in the modern field of literature, composition teaching increasingly went on in a sort of twilit underground, taught by unwilling graduate student conscripts and badly paid non-tenured instructors. In short, there simply never evolved a discipline of English compositioncomparable to literary studies in English. Composition teaching was done, but no degree specialties in composition existed, and no real scholarship surrounded it except for a few articles in education journals and in College English. From 1885 until after World War II, composition existed as a practice without a coherent theory or a developed history. The status of composition did not change until after 1950. The modern field of English compositiongrows out of a great change wrought in the American professoriat, especially in English, after World War II. Before that time, college had tended to be for an elite social class and the professors there had been an elect group. After the war, however, the GI Bill made educational loans easy for servicemen to get, and a great rush of veterans into colleges and universities resulted. Colleges groaned at the seams; many grew precipitously to serve all their new students. And from this mass of GI Bill students came a generation of graduate students and young faculty members who changed the face of English. These younger men, who were from all American social classes, brought fresh ideas with them, many of which democratized the staid old English field. In literature they championed American literature and the New Criticism; their teaching changed textual analyses from something only a trained philologist could do to something any earnest student was capable of. In composition their populist influence was even more powerful. Young professors had always been forced to teach composition, and most of them had gritted their teeth, served their time, and escaped to literature as soon as possible. A notable group within this post-World War II generation, however, determined to study composition, analyze it, and try to do it as best it could be done. At the same time that this GI Bill generation of teachers was beginning to emerge from graduate schools, the general education movement was sweeping America. Based on the idea that too narrow a subject specialization was not useful in life, the General Education movement sought to bring separated disciplines together. In the language arts this General Education movement was called the "communications" movement. The subjects it meant to conflate were reading, writing, speaking, and listening, and the departments that it got talking to one another, after thirty-five years of frigid silence, were Speech and English. It is here, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, that we can see the emergence of the new field of composition studies, as opposed to composition teaching. The post-World War II generation of active young teachers in English, brought together for the first time with colleagues from the older tradition represented by speech, began to forge during these years a new scholarly field. Its nature was represented by the name they gave the organization they founded in 1949: The Conference on College Composition and Communication. Immediately they established a journal: College Composition and Communication. At the beginning of the CCCC's existence, the writing appearing in the journal was nearly always concerned with actual issues in the contemporary teaching of writing. But by the late 1950s, writers on composition issues were beginning to reach out toward collateral fields, looking at the theory behind the practice, beginning to investigate rhetoric and linguistics in a serious way. English compositionwas coming into its own as a discipline. And it was here, in this rapidly changing decade, that the first great research into the history of composition teaching was done: Albert Kitzhaber 1953 dissertation, Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850-1900.