Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location
Language: English
Pages: 280
ISBN: 0809325829
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Responding to a growing pedagogical paralysis in debates over the nature and status of composition studies as an academic discipline, Lisa Ede offers a provocative inquiry into the politics of composition’s place in the academy. The result is a timely and engaging reflection on the rhetoric, ideology, and ethics of scholarship and instruction in composition studies today.
Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location delves into some of the most vexing issues presently facing the field: its status in relation to English studies, the nature and consequences of the writing process movement, the uneven professionalization of composition teachers, and the widening chasm between theory and practice. Ede interrogates key moments and texts in composition’s evolution, from the writing process movement to Susan Miller’s Textual Carnivals, through the interpretive lenses of historical analysis, theoretical critique, feminist and cultural theory, and Ede’s own two decades of experiences as a teacher and writing program administrator.
Questioning the narratives of progress and paradigm shifts that inform the field’s highly regarded recent theoretical studies, Ede urges scholars to carefully reconsider these claims, to honor the roles of teachers and students as more than dupes of ideology, and to more fully acknowledge—and utilize—the differences between the practice of theory and the practice of teaching. As academic hierarchies of knowledge increasingly privilege scholarship over instruction, Ede warns researchers to be cognizant of the politics and power inherent in their own location in the academy, particularly when professing to speak for teachers and students. To that end, the volume’s conclusion advocates pragmatic avenues for change and proffers topics for future discussion and debate.
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Rich’s effort to formulate a politics of location as it is of any other work, including my own. At the time that it was published and in the years immediately thereafter, Rich’s “Notes Toward a Politics of Location” made an important contribution to feminist and critical inquiry. As Caren Kaplan points out in “The Politics of Location as situating myself—and my argument Transnational Feminist Critical Practice,” in the mid- and late s, Rich’s essay helped to deconstruct “hegemonic uses
work of composition, but it has reminded me that as a scholar, I would do well to be modest in my expectations of the direct influence that my or any other scholars’ research can have on teaching, tutoring, and related practices. It is one thing to proclaim a revolution in the scholarly world of theory; it is another thing to enact that revolution in the pedagogical world of practice. It is the nature of practice to elude or resist representation. Even when this or that practice results in a
the competitive system of professions. () In the s and s, interprofessional competition over jurisdictional boundaries and processes was a particularly salient fact of life as scholars in composition sought to “redefine” composition’s “problems and tasks, defend them from interlopers, and seize new problems” (Abbott ). The writing process movement played a critical role in this effort. Just the fact that faculty were able to argue that composition was experiencing a new “movement” or
schooled writing—to the writing of “themes”—this course description situates writing in the context of “communities that may or may not share our assumptions and conventions.” Pedagogical Traces Reconsidered: Complicating the Story From one perspective, the course descriptions that I have just presented chart if not revolutionary changes in my teaching then a clear evolution from process to social process theories and practices. Such an evolution did, I believe, occur—but the result can hardly be
reflects on the universal first-year writing course and presents her alternative, “A Personal Essay on Freshman English,” Crowley modifies her earlier argument that the ethical technology of first-year writing classes is so hegemonic that it makes it impossible for productive work to occur in these classes and concedes “that, in theory, somewhere in America, some students who sit through a one- or two-semester required course in Freshman English master ‘correct’ English, especially if these
