Composition In The University: Historical and Polemical Essays

PREFACE

PREFACE I have been a teacher of composition for over thirty years. I have been a student of its history for almost that long. And yet I have an uneasy relation with composition. Teaching composition is a rewarding and exciting job. Living with its situation in the university is something else altogether. This is not an easy book to publish. I fear that its conclusions will be marshaled as evidence by those who want to make universities into the kinds of places they were in the 196os, before all that antiwar stuff started up, of course, when 95 percent of student bodies were white and when 6o percent of students were men. Freshman English has a role to play in this proposed makeover: the universally required introductory course will once again be used as the gate to the university, as it has been, more often than not, during its not altogether savory history. I do not think this is a good thing, for teachers , for students, or for the future of composition in the university. I risk publishing a critique of the institutional foundation of composition at what is perhaps an inauspicious cultural moment, because, as luck would have it, this is an auspicious professional moment for those who teach composition in the university. We now have an opportunity to decide whether our art and our discipline will remain in thrall to attitudes about and uses of composition that descend from an older, very different kind of university. Many assertions in the text are supported by large and complex arguments that for continuity's sake I could not rehearse. I indicate that a detailed argument supports something I have said by appending the name or names of its author(s) between parentheses, like this: (O'Neill). This device refers the reader to a source or sources, listed in the Works Cited, in which they can find that argument. If a date or page numbers follow the name in parentheses, that indicates a cite or other specific indebtedness. Masculine pronouns predominate in this text. In its historical portions I use men to mean "human beings," as did the men and women about whom I IX X-<+ PREFACE ambiguous (and distractingly funny) termfreshperson. I decided to acquiesce in an older practice because the alternative was to render the text nearly unreadable by cluttering it with sics. Perhaps the insistent use of the male pronoun is now unusual enough to call attention to itself, and so the partiality entailed in its repeated appearance in historical texts-where all teachers or students are referred to as he or him-may be apparent to readers. The necessity of masculine pronouns overlays a gender issue raised by this study. I analyze a frankly male educational tradition. Sometimes the people quoted here wrote as though they considered women to be part of humanity, and sometimes they wrote as if they did not. My decision to write about a male tradition does not mean that I am not forwarding a feminist agenda. In this study I use the term modern to designate that congeries of cultural assumptions and ideologies that are also tagged with the term Enlightenment. In other words, modern designates dominant fictions that were current during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries of Western history. ...