The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns

1. Learning and the Learned in Colonial New England

 1 Learning and the Learned in Colonial New England By the power of eloquence, ould truth receivs new habit . . .The same verity is again and again perhaps set before the same guests, but drest and disht up after a new manner, and every manner season’d so well that the intellectuall parts may . . . [provide] fresh nourishing virtue. Michael Wigglesworth in 1650, “Prayse of Eloquence,” 9. We are now in circumstances similar to those which produced the greatest orators of ancient days . . . Our governments are popular. The arts and sciences are fast advancing among us, and our present diYcult situation urges us to every eVort for our political safety. These considerations should lead us to cultivate this noble art, and cannot fail to produce men who, pleading our great American cause, shall consume all before them, with the ardent blaze of Demosthenes, or the wide spreading Xame of a Tully. Thomas Ennals in 1775, “On Ancient Eloquence,” 3. These student orations on the virtues of rhetoric highlight several of the converging textual, epistemological , and political changes that shaped the Wrst century of English studies in American colleges.Wigglesworth’s oration seems rather quaint, and not just because he wrote before English was standardized by print.His notebooks show that he learned to deWne eloquence as the art of dressing up “ould truth” in a new style from reading Peter Ramus. Such assumptions were consistent with the duties that seventeenth-century college graduates assumed as preachers of virtue in isolated communities.Wigglesworth’s oration has a timeless quality Learning and the Learned in Colonial New England  that ironically makes it feel quite dated, while Ennals spoke directly to the politics of his time. Before a commencement audience that included the Continental congressmen assembled in Philadelphia, Ennals invoked the civic virtues of rhetoric in order to strengthen the public authority of the liberally educated in an era of revolutionary change.The religious and political divisions of the latter half of the eighteenth century helped created a need for graduates who were prepared to speak and write for diverse audiences.Colleges responded by introducing forensic debates to prepare students to speak to contemporary issues. From the founding of Harvard until the establishment of a half dozen colleges a century later, the colonial curriculum maintained the emphasis on deductive reasoning in an ancient language that had long prevailed in Britain and Europe.The rhetorical dynamics of literacy and literacy studies changed as the colonies gave rise to a reading public that drew upon republican doctrines to constitute a national identity. The literate were challenged to persuade audiences that for the Wrst time had choices to make regarding which church to attend and what to read. In response to these challenges, rhetoric came to replace logic as the paragon of literate inquiry in the college curriculum , and the prevailing conception of literature shifted from a religious to an oratorical framework.The transition from religious to oratorical literature was part of the response to the expansion of literacy and the diversiWcation of the literate, most notably the rising numbers of graduates who went into secular careers. The increasing access to books and magazines broke down the conWnes of the scribal curriculum, which had compensated for the lack of books by relying on classroom recitations and declamations. These oral modes of instruction and the deductive mindset of scholasticism were consistent with the didactic sermons that college graduates would preach to their isolated congregations of fellow believers, while the changes in literacy and literacy studies in the middle of the eighteenth century were part of the response to the debates over individual religious and political rights that began with the Great Awakening of populist evangelism in the 1740s. The earliest description that we have of the scope and purpose of the American college curriculum is provided by New England’s First Fruits, which was published in London in 1643 to enlist support for the new college: “After God had carried us safe to New England, . . . One of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministery to the Churches, when our present  Learning and the Learned in Colonial New England Ministers shall lie in the Dust” (6).To prepare the literate to preach and teach the Word, Harvard students participated in monthly “declamations in Latine and Greeke, and Disputations Logicall and Philosophicall...