NOTES
NOTES I. COMPOSITION IN THE UNIVERSITY I. A conservative way to figure the magnitude of introductory composition is to consider that there are more than 3,6oo colleges and universities in the country. If only one hundred freshmen enroll in introductory composition at each of these schools, more than 36o,ooo students take the course every semester. However, there are over 300 large public universities in the country that enroll more than w,ooo students. Universities of this size presumably enroll about 2,;oo freshmen annually, and so they need to offer at least 100 sections of the freshman course if they limit enrollment to 25 students per section. They need to hire at least ;o teachers, if they limit teaching loads to two sections (as is commonly done in research universities, where graduate teaching assistants staff the composition program). A few very large public universities-Arizona State, Michigan State, Minnesota, Ohio State, Texas, Texas A&M---enroll 6,ooo to 8,ooo students in their freshman classes every fall semester. If universities of this size limit enrollments to 25 students per section, they need to offer at least 240 sections of the course and employ 120 people to teach it. These figures do not include courses taught at community colleges, where Freshman English is the largest program mounted by English departments. 2. In 1992 the Modern Language Association published a sizeable collection of essays entitled Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn. The stated purpose of this collection was to provide graduate students with an "adequate sense" of the reconstitution of English studies that has been brought about by contemporary literary theory as well as feminist and ethnic criticisms (3). The collection includes over twenty essays on fields such as medieval studies, Victorian studies, American literary studies prior to the Civil War, gender, feminist, African-American, and Marxist criticisms, deconstruction, postcolonialism, and the new historicism. Now, while composition studies has also been affected by recent developments in theory, the collection contains only one essay on composition. The editors of the collection did not find a prominent scholar in the field to write the essay on composition, as they did for other areas; rather, they commissioned a historian who happens to direct the composition program at Harvard. Although the essay cites a few pieces of composition scholarship published during the 1970s and early 198os, its author basically concludes, as Tom Miller notes, that composition "does not exist as a 268-- 269 Cicero claims that poets recorded the virgins' names, he does not report them. 2. Eagleton does make the point about education and the formation of subjectivity in "The Subject of Literature" (1985). For the theoretical basis of the notion of ethical subjectivity, see Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self(1988). 3· In taking this position I dissent from mainstream thought in composition studies, wherein rhetoric and composition are yoked, as here, with a companionly "and." See Susan Miller (1989) for an elaboration of the argument that composition instruction and rhetorical education are very different things. 4· Bevilaqua is correct in the main when he opines that scientific rhetoric pays less attention to values than ancient rhetorics did. Certainly the pseudoscientific school rhetoric that developed during the nineteenth century, called "currenttraditional rhetoric" by historians, throve in American universities for more than a hundred years partly because it was perceived to be value-neutral. On the other hand, Bevilaqua is wrong about the valence of "imaginative-poetic" concerns for rhetoric, at least with reference to the modern period. Modern rhetoricians' investment in the aesthetic notion of taste was every bit as deadly for rhetorical education as its supposed collusion with scientific discourse proved to be. )· Gregory Clark traces the influence of this tradition of taste on American Calvinist rhetoric in "The Oratorical Poetic of Timothy Dwight" (1993). 6. The belles-lettres tradition can be opposed to the scientific-empirical tradition of American school rhetoric, a tradition carried forward by writers like Alexander Bain and Henry Noble Day, who were inspired by George Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) rather more than by Blair. It was this tradition that spawned currenttraditional rhetoric. However, even those authors most tightly wedded to the scientific paradigm, like Bain, devoted a few pages of their texts to the cultivation of taste (1877, 12o-21). 4. THE INVENTION OF FRESHMAN ENGLISH r. This change has often been recounted by historians of higher education: see Earnest, Horowitz, Rudolph, Vesey...
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