In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

i n T R o d U C T i o n Making knowledge in Composition Then, now, and in the future Lance Massey Richard C. Gebhardt Two ideas motivated this project from the beginning of our collaboration on it. On one hand, we have worked to develop a book that revisits Stephen North’s The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (MKC) nearly twenty-five years after its publication in 1987. On the other hand, we want to use this retrospective orientation as an occasion for trying to make sense of the ways knowledge making has (or hasn’t) changed in the years since the publication of North’s controversial and, by most accounts, influential book, and how it might change in the future. Consequently, this volume is not a festschrift, nor is it merely a critical reexamination of an aging canonical text. The call for chapter proposals, rather, invited “works that critically reassess such things as MKC’s influence/impact, rhetoric, aims, and values—with an eye toward using such reassessments to comment on the present and future of composition studies.” A talented and diverse group of scholars responded to that call, allowing us to offer you a collection that uses North’s book as a framing context within which to explore the methodological , theoretical, and institutional currents of composition’s recent evolution and to anticipate future developments for the field. And what better time for such a collection? Just as MKC was published at what was arguably a watershed moment in composition—the field’s transition from an essentially modern to an essentially postmodern discipline (see Lance Massey’s chapter in this volume)—we now find ourselves on the brink of what may become an equally paradigmatic shift, as we hear ever more calls to replace traditional composition and the pedagogical imperative that term has long implied with a writing studies model devoted to the study of writing as a fundamental tool of and force within 2 TH E C H A N G I N G OF KN OWLED G E I N C OM P OSI T I ON all realms of human society.1 By enacting the ambivalence inherent in such moments of transition—by, that is, proffering the postmodern epistemological argument that knowledge is made, not found, while choosing to do so in the monograph format for its decidedly modernist advantages of “coherence and breadth of vision” (5) and being the “product of a single consciousness” (5)—MKC became a flashpoint for enacting the disciplinary anxieties attendant to composition’s transition into a postmodernist discipline. Indeed, even North’s efforts to revive practitioner “lore” (the nonsystematic, informal knowledge of teachers who need help with Monday’s lesson plan, not with analyzing standardized curricula as a form of panoptic discipline) were simultaneously lauded as a refreshingly “postdisciplinary” approach to teachers and teaching (Harkin 1989) and derided as “the imperialist’s vision of the native” (i.e., teacher), which is “odious” and “untrue” (Bartholomae 1988, 225). While we do not hope to set off any disciplinary melees, we see in this collection a deep ambivalence, running parallel to the ambivalence we find in MKC, • as a project that both envisions composition retaining its commitment to broad-based, generalized writing instruction and sees it heading toward content-based vertical writing programs in departments and programs of writing studies, • as a project that variously challenges and affirms composition’s pedagogical heritage, • and as a project that sounds both sanguine and pessimistic notes about composition’s future as a discipline We see in this collection, that is, all the signs that we again face a moment of precariousness in composition, poised to move not from 1. See, for example, North’s chapter 11 in this volume; see also Bazerman (2002), Cushman (1998), Foster (2007), and Miller (2005). We do not mean to imply that there have been no pedagogical arguments from within this writing studies sensibility . In fact, Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle’s “Teaching About Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning ‘First Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies,’” which is devoted exclusively to the problem of how to effectively teach writing in college, has been among the more talked-about publications in College Composition and Communication in recent years. We also do not mean the list of authors that begins this note to be exhaustive but, rather, representative. Virtually anybody who studies writing from a perspective informed by Actor-Network Theory, Activity Theory...

Share