Constructing composition: History, disciplinarity, and ideology.

摘要

Disciplinary histories of composition have served an important function in building the field's institutional ethos, as they construct shared understandings of composition's origins and influences. However, despite their integral role in building disciplinary identification, early records of the field often mask key elements related to the formation of composition's history and tradition: inconsistencies between definitions of the field; competing audiences and ideologies among a diverse group of composition students and scholars; and disputed, changing interpretations of the field's boundaries and designs. Such elements are crucial to understanding the relationships between disciplinary formation and institutional ethics, as the manner in which composition histories are recorded influences how the field's constituents perceive their roles, their purpose, and their ideals within the university.;This project therefore analyzes the rhetoric of three full-length disciplinary histories commonly cited within composition scholarship---Stephen North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (1987), James Berlin's Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges 1900--1985 (1987), and Susan Miller's Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition (1991)---in order to classify the rhetoric of composition history and to interpret this rhetoric's implicit and explicit inscription of ideological assumptions regarding the nature of disciplinary roles, boundaries, and agendas. To that end, the study descriptively and analytically addresses five historiographic features appearing in the histories: the stated purpose of each work and its relation to previous histories; the construction of audience within each work; the prevailing themes and keywords grounding the texts' visions of disciplinary history; and the structures of the historical narratives. This analysis reveals three noteworthy patterns in early histories: the texts share difficulties in forging historical methods appropriate for their purposes; they fail to adequately address the needs of their intended audience members; and they reinscribe the traditional characterization of composition as institutionally marginalized and powerless.;Using Joseph Harris' A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966 (1997) as a model for building revised conceptions of composition studies, the project thus recommends three discursive elements useful to creating more critical and ideologically self-conscious accounts of disciplinary formation: methodological disclosure; ideological contextualization; and rhetorical transparency.