Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the
University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P,
1998. Print.
As I continue to explore the development of and the effects
of disciplinarity on composition this week, I was drawn to some histories of
English in the university. So I will write about a few chapters from two texts
I read this week. One book that has been on my shelf for perhaps a bit too long
was Sharon Crowley’s Composition in the
University.
Chapter 2: “The Toad in the Garden”
In this chapter, Crowley focuses on the Gary Tate-Erica Lindemann
debate (that took place in College
English) about the appropriateness of literature in freshman composition
courses. What she found most compelling in the debate was Lindemann’s question
on what the focus, the subject of freshman composition should be. Crowley
examines how those who were responding to Lindemann missed the value of this
question and instead expound on the importance of literature’s humanist values.
As a result, the responses in the debate maintained the same separations of
composition and literature, claiming for literature universal value and
therefore higher status than composition. But these responses (she points to one
from Leon Knight in particular) ignore pedagogical issues. Other responses
claimed that literature, because of its “higher” moral and intellectual value,
was saving composition from being a service course only. Still others equated
English with literary studies, suggesting composition was somehow outside the
discipline. Extending from this, some argued for cutting composition
altogether. Crowley points to these arguments as maintaining the disciplinary
hierarchies that had marginalized composition for decades and failing to
address the real issues generated by Lindemann’s question. Crowley takes on
that question and Lindemann’s proposals in the last part of the chapter.
While she liked the question, she did not particularly favor
Lindemann’s proposals. Lindemann suggested that composition focus on a broad
set of texts and writing practices drawn from various disciplines to help
students learn the writing skills/practices they would need to write
successfully in their areas of study. While a noble goal, Crowley says this
makes the focus of freshman composition too narrow or too broad. As she says,
“it must either become so specialized that it becomes difficult to see what
would hold it together, or it must become so abstract that the work done there
would have little reference to actual academic or professional writing” (28).
She is also concerned that this response does not change composition’s status
as service work. In the end, she concludes that we may need to consider the
universality of the freshman writing course. In other words, she is staging
those larger questions we must consider about the discipline: What should the
subject matter of composition be the keep the class relevant and intellectually
valuable? How should we go about teaching this? And are the problems of
composition created by the fact that it is a universal requirement? But these
are the kinds of questions that have existed since the beginning of the
discipline, which she picks up in subsequent chapters.
Chapter 4: “The Invention of Freshman English”
As the title indicates, this chapter traces the development
of freshman composition during the latter half of the nineteenth century,
emphasizing particularly the last decades of the 1800s and into the early
1900s. In doing so, she gives much of her attention to the loss of rhetoric (as
more classically defined) in this period as well as the marginalization of
composition, which she says shaped English studies as a whole. These trends
have made change in the discipline ultimately quite difficult.
To claim that rhetoric was “lost” during this development of
freshman composition means, of course, that it had to have existed visibly in
the curriculum before, and Crowley clearly illustrates the prominence rhetoric
held in the classical college, often being a significant part of the college
curriculum from beginning to end. The significance given rhetoric fit the
purposes of education at the time period prior to the Civil War. These purposes
were, quite simply, to create good men with strong civic aptitudes and notions
of civic responsibility. Rhetoric was civic rhetoric at this point, but this
was to change with the increasing popularity of the works of Campbell, Blair,
and Whately, which began to put a more humanisitic and belletristic spin on rhetoric.
Another significant change that began altering the curriculum (including the
place of rhetoric) was the adoption of the German model of university education
that emphasized research over teaching. Because of these shifts, she says
English needed to adopt three strategies to develop into a discipline. First,
it needed to establish that students had problems in English; those in the
field achieved this end by emphasizing issues of purity and correctness—and
complaints of students lack on these accounts. Second, the discipline needed to
test for these problems. Entrance exams were established and, as tests
typically do, they found numerous “deficiencies” that justified the need to
teach English. Finally, the discipline needed a course that would address these
problems, and thus composition was developed and turned into a more mechanistic
course, given the concerns on clarity and correctness.
As she sketches this history, Crowley focuses mostly on the changes
that occurred in the larger private and research institutions (Harvard, Yale,
etc.). And while these institutions did carry considerable cultural cachet and
could (and did) influence curriculum on a broad scale, Crowley does treat these
changes as somewhat universal. Furthermore, she establishes a useful
disciplinary trajectory of the development of the freshman writing course, but
though she claims this chapter argues that composition legitimated the whole
field of English studies, she does not realize that argument in this chapter.
Instead, she addresses it in the next chapter.
Chapter 5: “Literature and Composition: Not Separate but Certainly Unequal”
Crowley uses this chapter to extend her discussion on the
disciplinary development of English studies, this time examining how literature
worked its way into composition courses and how the focus of the discipline
became literary studies. And again, she ties the marginalization of composition
to the decline of rhetoric. As rhetoric fell from prominence and belletrism
began to take its place—at least in English departments—the field began to
develop a sense that familiarity with “good” literature would be sufficient to
teach students how to write well. A sense of elitism pervaded the curriculum of
the discipline: literature was reserved for those who proved their propriety;
rhetoric (and composition) was for those who needed more “refinement.”
Her discussion of this dichotomy leads into the familiar
tale of the development of English A at Harvard and the preponderance of daily
themes. Such heavy workloads forced faculty to rely on an efficiency approach
that emphasized formal and surface-level concerns. This developed into current
traditional rhetoric (CTR). This was a formulaic system that, a la scientific
approaches, tried to develop universals that could be applied to writing. Form
was privileged over rhetoric, and failures of students to apply the forms
correctly suggested character flaws in the students. Through CTR, Crowley
claims literature began to creep into composition because faculty could point to
literature as exemplifying both effective form and good character. From this
point through the 1970s (and even somewhat today), literature provided the main
texts for freshman writing courses. Even the communication skills movement in
the 1940s and 1950s could not unseat CTR methods and literature from the
composition classroom. After this point, though, questions began to arise about
the need for composition to have a subject. The humanists again quickly turned
the focus back to literature as the appropriate subject for composition. She
says that composition was so buffeted about “because of the absolute lack of
theoretical innovation in composition” prior to the 1970s (115). The problem,
as she describes it here, was perhaps less because of the lack of a desire for
composition to advance theoretically as it was the traditional humanists who
held positions of power denying any moves toward pragmatics.
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