Goggin - Authoring a discipline: scholarly journals and the post-World War II emergence of rhetoric and composition

The rhetorician must know more about history, and the historian must know more about rhetoric.

Everett Lee Hunt (173)

This book traces the post-World War II emergence of rhetoric and composition as a discipline within departments of English in U.S. institutions of higher education. It examines the disciplinary formation through the lens of one of the most important vehicles for this field, its scholarly journals. Covering a forty-year span between 1950 and 1990, this history treats some of the complex struggles in which scholars and teachers have engaged to stake a ground and construct a professional and disciplinary identity. In short, this book identifies major debates and controversies ignited as the discipline emerged, traces issues and principles that have been foregrounded, and analyzes how those who directed the journals and those who contributed to them helped to shape, and in turn were shaped by, the field of rhetoric and composition.

As is now commonplace for historians, let me say this is not the history of the disciplinary formation but one story of many to be told. It is perhaps easier to say what a book is not rather than what it is, the temptation simply to retell its story being too great. Here then is what this book is not. First, this is not a history of writing instruction. Many excellent histories have been, and are still being, written about this important part of our past and present. Among the more recent exemplars are Robert Connorss Composition-Rhetoric, Sharon Crowleys Composition in the University, Joseph Harriss A Teaching Subject, and John Breretons The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 18751925. These have taken their place alongside the foundational book-length histories by Albert Kitzhaber, Arthur Applebee, James Berlin, Nan Johnson, Susan Miller, and David Russell. Second, this is not an intellectual history or a history of ideas. Fine histories in this vein have been written. Among them, Martin Nystrand, Stuart Greene, and Jeffrey Wiemelt provided an excellent account of some of the various schools of thought that have influenced the intellectual zeitgeist not only of rhetoric and composition but also of linguistics and literary studies since 1950. In Rhetoric and Reality, James Berlin presented an important account of various rhetorical theories and their associated pedagogies in his effort to map the terrain of writing instruction in the 20th century. Stephen North, in The Making of Knowledge in Composition, offered a useful classification of knowledge-making communities of researchers, scholars, and teachers. Finally, unlike the excellent treatments of particular institutions (Varnum), specific individuals (Campbell; Maher; Stewart and Stewart), or particular practices (Gere; LeFevre; Trachsel) that have influenced our more recent history, this book focuses more broadly on the institutionalization of rhetoric and composition as a discipline but at the same time more narrowly on its major scholarly journals. It traces changes in objects of inquiry, methodologies, and discourses; shifts in the identities of contributors and editors, and in editorial policies and practices to demonstrate how a discipline both responds to and is shaped by a confluence of forces. More specifically, it shows how journals, as one legitimating instrument of disciplinarity, function in a dialectical relation with a discipline.