Rhetoric and/or/not Composition?

Horner, Bruce, and Min-Zhan Lu. “Working Rhetoric and Composition.” College English 72.5 (2010): 470-94. Print.

In this article, Horner and Lu examine the seemingly settled relationship of rhetoric and composition, exploring how these terms are used in the field and what relationships (political, pedagogical, and theoretical) are implied by certain uses of the terms. Their argument rests on the idea that for rhetoric and composition to be a flexible discipline, the understandings of “rhetoric” and “composition” need to be constantly revised to reflect the histories and the changes in material conditions of the work of the discipline.

They begin by plotting the various uses of rhetoric, composition, and rhetoric and composition. They find that these terms are either synonymous with each other, with writing, and/or with English; that the terms are rarely defined; and that rhetoric and composition often appear in a hierarchical relationship. Such uses of these terms, they argue, effectively hamstring the possibility of a dynamic and non-hegemonic discipline. They emphasize the need for a more conscious sense of what these terms mean to us and for a more developed sense of “the histories and conditions” of the work of rhetoric and composition (475).

To apply these methods of “working” rhetoric and composition, Horner and Lu examine how this work would affect the first-year writing course and graduate level courses. For them, a more productive first-year writing course would resist “the dichotomizing of rhetoric and composition” (480) that arises in debates about the role of the course—service or something else, for example. Their vision is a course focused on rhetorical concerns but those that arise from and are to be “reworked” in student writing. They see some graduate curricula as positioning rhetoric as historical and composition as pedagogical and theoretical. Such a separation limits students’ abilities to fully contextualize both the history and theory/pedagogy of the discipline and reinforces the hierarchical relationships that keep the two separate. On a broader scale, then, they are looking to a more inclusive sense of rhetoric and composition, one that values both the theory and the practice as mutually informing instead of mutually exclusive.

Admittedly, I take for granted the relationship of rhetoric and composition and rarely give much thought to how I use the terms, how I view their relationship to one another, and how this may reinforce certain hierarchies between the two. And though I am hesitant to discount the need for “real world” writing skills in undergraduate composition courses (as they seem to want) and have no experience teaching graduate courses on which to evaluate their claims about graduate programs, I do find their sense of the entrenching positions of rhetoric and of composition as doing the discipline a disservice. Throughout the article, they pose numerous questions that anyone seriously exploring rhetoric and composition and their relation to one another needs to consider.