Protest Rhetorics

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“The Manufacture of Dissent: What the Left Can Learn from Las Vegas”
Andrew Boyd and Stephen Duncomb

“The Web Rewires the Movement”
Andrew Boyd

“Truth is a Virus”
Andrew Boyd

“Spank the Bank”
Andrew Boyd

“Extreme Costume Ball: A New Protest Movement Hits the Streets in Style”
Andrew Boyd

“The Rhetoric of the Open Hand and the Rhetoric of the Closed Fist”
Edward PJ Corbett

Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks, Volume I
Ed. Joseph A Buttigieg
Trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari

CCC
1965-1969

Students’ Right to Their Own Language

The Hope and the Legacy: The Past, Present, and Future of “Students’ Right to Their Own Language”
Patrick Bruch and Richard Marback

English in America: A Radical View of the Profession
Richard Ohmann

“The Manufacture of Dissent: What the Left Can Learn from Las Vegas”
Andrew Boyd and Stephen Duncomb

In this article Boyd and Duncomb propose the Left (of the American political spectrum) should learn from Las Vegas and the Right. The truth is out of style. Borrowing from Guy Debord, they suggest using spectacle as a way to persuade; from their point of view the Left is waiting for the “mythic republic of of letters and reason of the 18th century” (6) to materialize and when it does they (the Left) can rely on their normal strategy: be reasonable, be rationale, embody the values of the Enlightenment, and point out to the masses how they’re being fooled. This isn’t working–in fact it’s backfiring. As Boyd and Duncomb explain:

In our fetishization of the truth and our seeming unconcern for presentation and popular desire we merely confirm the stereotype the Right has created of the Left: (snobby) Experts with (inhuman) Ideals; supercilious school principals telling the rest of us to do our homework. If the masses like Las Vegas, then the Left has got to figure out what it is about Las Vegas they like. (4)

Here’s the spectacle they propose:

This is the popular vernacular we should adopt: creating spectacle which is understood as spectacle; one that still has symbolic power but lets the reader in on the production. Such a spectacle is open ended. It doesn’t portray itself as “The Truth” but instead allows each spectator to imagine for herself, to build their own truth. It is a spectacle that is semiotically participatory…It will be a different type of spectacle, one which would be sincere without laying claim to The Truth, democratically acknowledge the constructedness of the spectacle without slipping into cynical irony, and speak to the imagination without becoming a completely imaginary politics. This is our design challenge. (5)

Examples of this would be the Billionares for Bush, the preachings of Rev. Billy, or Reclaim the Streets.

“The Web Rewires the Movement”
Andrew Boyd

“The Web Rewires the Movement” is Boyd’s recounting of how United for Peace and Justice borrowed the tactics and social networking technology of MoveOn.org to organize multiple, concurrent anti-war protest in 2003. Using email mailing lists, an organizational website, and online “organizing tool kit” (available through their website and made available to individals who wanted to organize a protest in their town) United for Peace and Justice organized a simultaneous worldwide anti-war protest with few paid staffers and no attempt to start brick-and-mortar branches.

Towards the end of the article Boyd concedes there are issues with using the Internet and echoes the article on CMC when he explains “[t]he Interent is best for pulling together a coalition when there already is a broad sense of agreement–as there was for the UFPJ and MoveOn around the Iraq war” (5). Boyd continues on to claim that the best type of collective movement using is on that is a hybrid of traditional pavement pounding and social networking technology. Citing that the UFPJ not only used their website to reach people, but also distributed “1.2 million pieces of literature in six languages in every corner of New York City” (5), NYC being the organizations physical home location and a locale where–according to Boyd–400,000 people turned out for the event (1).

Money quotes:

the Internet won’t replace traditional organizing, but it does alter the rules in important ways. Because e-mail is near-instantaneous and costs just fractions of a penny, one can communicate very quickly with a lot
of people at the speed of word of mouth. (5)

Because it [the Internet] is still an open-publishing model, free from the constraints of corporate-owned media, it can carry the channels of alternative information essential for sustaining social movements. (5)

Although MoveOn does not track member demographics, anecdotal evidence suggests that its base is disproportionately white. (Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun, for example, faired poorly in the group’s recent “primary.”) This reflects the persevering digital divide, in which, according to a recent Pew survey, a full 24 percent of Americans are totally offline, and those who are online still tend to be younger, whiter, suburban, better-off and better educated…With only 3 percent of the world’s population online, the divide is even more pronounced in international campaigns. (3, 5)

“Truth is a Virus”
Andrew Boyd

In this essay Boyd uses memes as the way to transmit media viruses, and links the creation of such viruses and the injecting of them intothe cultural pysche through protest networks. This concept of media virus ties directly into Boyd’s work with spectacle and for examples he uses his own “Billionares for Bush (or Gore)” on pages one through four. Boyd explains:

For activist viruses, the viral shell is often a model of participatory action. For RTS [Rcleaim the Streets] the ideological code was a utopian demand to resist capital and liberate public space; the action model was a militant street carnival. It was the RTS action model that drove its viral explosion. People across the world grabbed onto the carnival, replicated it, and mutated it in their own way. As with Critical Mass, the RTS ideological code was elegantly embedded in the action itself. By doing the action, participants live the code themselves as well as deploy the code for others to reckon with. In the Billionaires campaign, the action model, though an important component, did not drive the campaign; it was more the sly and funny propaganda packaging of the ideological code. (5)

From my point of view, it would seem Boyd is saying the best rhetorical act embodies the ideology of a protest group. To take part in a performative act and for that act be a direct expression of the group’s ideology is to have the individual actors make the ideology part of their navigational schema, and at the same time, spread the idea to observers watching.

Here’s Boyd’s take on protest groups based on memes, which seems to match the defintion of flash/smart mobs from Rheingold:

Because they coalesce around an idea and/or a mode of action, rather than an organization, movements based on memes tend to be “cheap, fast, and out of control” (to borrow a phrase often used to describe the life-like behaviors of complex systems and dense information networks). Cheap and fast are generally good qualities for a grass-roots movement. Out of control is a mixed blessing: on the one hand, they tend to spread quickly; on the other hand, they sometimes die just as quickly. This was the case for the Women’s Action Coalition, the dynamic feminist direct action group. At its height in ‘93 WAC had 300 women coming to weekly meetings (in New York alone), a furious barrage of actions and press coverage, and copy-cat chapters around the world, but by ‘95 it had folded. Meme-based movements may generate passionate community and a white-hot intensity of action, but unless there’s an ongoing mass ritual such as monthly Critical Mass rides or unless they develop some kind of organizational infrastructure they tend not to last. (5)

So it would seem this is a collective action with no larger meaning besides of the moment groundswell of anger, disapproval, or discontent. Coupling this with the other articles by Boyd, it would seem to match his message that for this type of protest to be part of a larger movement these acts and groups performing them must be seen as part of the ecosystem or network of a social movement, but they can not be expected to make social change in and of themselves. While Boyd approves of and utilizes the DIY organizing methods of smart mobs, he does not see them as sustained spectacle to make lasting change–even if they inject a media virus. The media cycle is quick and short, ergo, constant injections must be made using the method over and over.

“Spank the Bank”

In this short piece for the Village Voice, Boyd reports on his time at the Ruckus Society’s “Alternative Spring Break Direct Action Training Camp” in 2001. During this camp Boyd came in and taught some on guerilla theater techniques while others instructed protest minded students non-violent protest techniques. The target was Citibank due its predatory lending practices and insitutional practices of underservicing neighborhoods dominated by people of color.

In the article the students and trainers are up front about their political leverage as white college students, and they intend to use it performing evasive protest techniques–techniques that don’t seem to rely on the concepts of spectacle as discssed by Boyd in other texts. While this is all well and good (sometimes there have to be direct action protests to make an issue visible), the very element of whiteness may work against the continued participation of these students in these types of organizations. Unless they pick careers with a conscious, most of these students will buy into the system and take jobs that use the same practices they’re protesting against now. Also, this type of militant action is why the Left is vilified.

“Extreme Costume Ball: A New Protest Movement Hits the Streets in Style”
Andrew Boyd

This short article is another piece for the Village Voice and is again a bit older. In “Extreme Costume…” Boyd explains the new aesthetic behind protest: carnival. In this style of protest, direct action is mixed with theater and comedy; protesters with arms linked through metal tubing and chanting slogans are mixed with fellow dissenters dressed as banker landsharks to point out the predartory policies of the WTO.

While this may work in getting media attention and attracting recruits, how is this taken up by observers? Are protests with this type costuming seen as serious reactions to events by the general public? Or does this create an ethos of foolishness, that is, people who can’t be taken serioiusly and are nothing more than rabble?

“The Rhetoric of the Open Hand and the Rhetoric of the Closed Fist”
Edward PJ Corbett

In this article Corbett defines the open hand as “old” rhetoric, the rhetoric of the Greece and Rome where the speaker spoke to an audience and made the rhetorical moves necessary to ingratiate himself to the audience. This ingratiating included word choice, appearance, topics, tropes and figures used, and even politeness strategies. This, in Corbett’s estimation, is the opposite of the “new” rhetoric, that is, the rhetoric of the closed fist. The new rhetoric, Corbetts says, is abrasive, fragmented, not dependent solely on the word but utilizes music, film, television, and simple slogans, and most of all, is a rhetoric of the body. Using the body to demonstrate, to stop normal operations, to take over buildings, is the”new” method for opening channels of communication.

Corbett is writing this in the 60s, and understands that the rhetoric of the closed fist is often used by people and groups in American society who did not (and still don’t) have regular and consistent access to the channels of communication that lead to the ruling class. Essentially, he’s describing Boyd’s (and to an extent Debord’s) theories that protest from the Left must be spectacle to persuade fence sitters on issues. Still, Corbett fears that the rhetoric of the closed fist, while appropritate at times, has become the rhetoric of choice and that its use shows that the new rhetoric is primarily coercive and not persuasive. Instead of a copious amount of choices to solve a problem, there’s only either one or the other, and because of this hard line there is no attempt by rhetors practicing the new rhetoric to use logic nor reason nor rationality nor the attempt to by opposing parties to meet on a common, mediatory ground.

While Corbett makes some interesting, erudite comments, the final section of the article betrays his real issue, which is the use of the closed fist by college students. Corbett appears distressed that even those with access to the culture of power–the elite young–have adopted the new rhetoric. His recommendation is to go back to the old rhetoric and develop a confrontational rhetoric that use both the old and the new rhetoric in an attempt to make an intelligent, ethical way of resolving conflict.

Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks, Volume I
Ed. Joseph A Buttigieg
Trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari

Introduction

Buttigieg stresses history in presented in the notebooks as an experience, not as contemplation. This is not only due to the stress of historical materialism as a lived experience focused on the particular and rejecting the universalizing of metaphysics, but also on the concept espousing “‘experience upon which the philosophy of praxis is based cannnot be schematized’” (64). Because of this, the notebooks should not be read looking for the “true” Gramsci, nor should they be imagined and edited in a way to foreground one ideal version of Gramsci, eg, the Leninist Gramsci, the liberating Gramsci, etc. The text is a product of a lived reality and reflects the situation Gramsci found himself in; the same event shaped how he brought order to the unstructured reality he found himself in.  The notebooks themselves are a moment of material history/reality.

Gramsci’s idea of a “disinterested point of view” has little to do with an objectivist or positivist stance when observing experiential reality.

Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis demanded a crtiicism full o f passionate intensity, a criticism that takes sides…Once he found himself exiled from the political arena, Gramsci wanted to pursue the same topic on a much larger scale, unconstrained by the tactical needs of the moment–hence the plans to examine the role played by the intellectuals in Italian history, their contribution to the formation of social groups and classes, their solidarity with each other, their function in sustaining the existing hegemony, their various types, and their changing status in an industrialized soceity.  An inquiry of these dimensions requires a very broad perspective, a virtually limitless investigative range, a special vantage point–in these respects, then, a “disinterested” point of view.  (11)

Gramsci’s ideas about analyzing and understanding culture appear to match up with the ideas of writers like Fuchs and Galloway and Thacker.  Knowing how a network speaks, writes, communicates, presents, and values allows for the creation of effective strategies for changing the network–either from working within the network for epistemological change or hacking into the network and exploiting said network’s work ability for your own counter-hegemonic goals.  You have to understand the network to change the network; if you don’t understand its idiosyncrasies, then you will fail to make lasting change.

Gramsci’s concern with intellectuals and his foregrounding of them throughout the notebooks comes from his intuition that intellectuals provide the necessary foundation for a nation-state’s hegemony to exist.  If intellectuals do not question commonplaces, then there is no questioning by anyone with any culture capital concerning if a government’s actions are ethical or beneficial to the largest number of a nation-state’s citizenry (31).

Gramsci never intended the notebooks to be anything more than the notes for a larger, more organic in appearance monograph.  By notebook eight he’s questioning his methodology and reviewing his work.

Gramsci stresses the problem with “scientific” work of the late 19th and early 20th century in sociology and criminology, while actually proporting to be progressive and aligned with socialist/Marxist goals, actually hurt the Italian left since it gave:

“scientific” legitimacy and contributed to the perpetuation of the deterministic (and fatalistic) belief that certain indviduals (criminials, for instance) as well as certian groups…are “barbaric” or primitives by nature, that is, biologically.  One important consequence of this kind of sociology is that it blocks the possibility of constructing an account of the history or repression–biology replaces the politics of power and domination as an explanation of the condition of the underprivleged.  (48)

The way around this scientific racism is to start with a particular incident, tie it to a bigger phenomenon, and then return back to the smaller incident.  Do not look to make the incident you start with part of some larger pattern or plan.  Explain the small, not make a connection to the unseen architect.  In the practical sense these types of explanations made the masses pawns in a larger game; localized tactics to change their immediate situation were impossible since everything was pre-ordained.

Buttigieg streses Gramsci’s uses a philological methodology–a minute attention to detail, the drive to understand every element of a single event.

To be sure, complex netwrowrks of relatins are established among these details and they, in turn, give rise to general concepts and theories–the most famous of which is “hegemony.”  However, if the detailed record of the particualr were allowed to vanish, if the relationship among the fragments were permanently fixed, then the concepts and theories would run the danger of becoming crystallizied into dogmas.  (63)

Through focusing on the little things within events, and refusing to try to ascribe events to larger, unifying theories, Gramsci felt he was avoiding dogmas and mystification, the tools which allowed for the continuation of the social-political status quo.

Chronology

The chronology is an enactment of historical materialism.  Buttigieg gives the pertinent info about Gramsci to make Gramsci and his work an object of study taken up the same way Gramsci takes up the subjects of his notebooks: an individual artifact that must be understood as the product of a set of historical developments which can not be attributed as the outcome of some essential quality or part of a larger plan made by an invisible architect.

The religious motivations for the status quo on page 100.  Basically, it’s the argument that 1) the poor are part of God’s plan; 2) the poor drive the wealthy towards a more ethical and moral life since they must provide alms and charity to the poor.  It’s a large ecosystem where ever piece has its purpose.

The creation of a loyal armed force from the ranks of the peasants page 103.  There seems to be a similar phenomenon even now.

Discussion of the Italian universities on pages 106-107.  Again, things aren’t that much different now.

On the bottom of 108 continuing onto 109, Gramsci explains there must be a go at the idyllic (by Enlightment standards) of a democratic republic before there can be a return to the monarchy or the beginning of fascist regime.  Once it is felt by enough of the middle class that the project is a failure, ie, their poorly defined interests are not severed, then there can be an abandoning of the Enlightenment project.  The context is France and the monarchist party, but I think it’s easy enough to apply this to all societies.

Page 115–examples of various theorists and monographs that claim they are there to help the common person, but in the long run essentialize and are used to disenfranchise various marginal or unpopular groups.

Marx’s positive sarcasm on page 118.

Examples of a “Lumbroso-ite” on page 119.  Notice the absurd claims.

Every political movement uses its own language to describe the world outside of it; the movement only acknowledges those who speak in those terms (126).  Reminiscent of Fuchs ideas concerning the core of networks.

This idea extended to the education of citizens (nodes); the education is not positivist or objective–it’s the indoctrination into the values of the dominant hegemony (core) (128).

There are no “explosions” in the social sphere if the observer is instilled with a critical sense (129).

In a period of crises the most marginal sections react first (130).

Classes must lead before they assume power (136).  Those who already lead can coerce since they control the superstructure.  This echos Zinn and his ideas about the leaders of the American Revolution.  Often, they term their ideas in the form of being progressive.  Very often intellectuals of note come from this class, and these intellectuals subordinate the intellectuals of other classes.  This subordination occurs since the intellectuals of the lesser classes want to identify or be identified by intellectuals of the progressive class; this is a major piece of how dominant hegemony works.  Intellectuals stop a class conscious from evolving–salvation (the transcendence of social ills) comes from concepts that only reify practices and ideas which don’t benefit the lesser classes.

The masses outside the ruling class must be pressed into army service to protect democracy (140).  This is the penultimate god term.  Poorly defined and so amorphous it can mean anything, this idea is the carrot on the stick.  It teases those who don’t actually profit from it, and, in the case of Italy, is often used against them (see the earlier section of the necessary conditions for fascism).

144–an example of how postivist sociology hurt the Left in Italy.

145–due to their shared worldview and similarity in position and ideas, it’s easier to start political work with the intellectuals.  Once you can gain critical mass among them things move quickly; one identifies with the other, see themselves consubstantial with other intellectuals, and wants to produce work other intellectuals will see as intellectual work.

Broad terms like “unity and independence” mean nothing but are broad enough anyone can project their own values onto both words.  It means something for intellectuals and resonates with the larger culture outside the academy (146).

Successful political parties leverage the bourgeoisie.  This means the survival of the party since they keep them happy, and this happiness turns into funding or support (147).  If the English had kept Washington and the other Founding Fathers happy, there most likely wouldn’t have been a revolution.

153–Education and pedagogy coerce the masses into seeing the dominant hegemony as “natural.”

160–describes the moves being made now in the US by the more conservative party.

163–Moral/religious leaders speak for those who are not represented by any of the parties.

169–hegemony comes from the workplace/market place for most everyday folk.  They see their fortunes tied to either/or and will follow whatever seems ensures their continued livelihood.

171–History of Sexuality tie in.

The levelheaded are needed when trying to create a new social order.

All the most ridiculous daydreamers descend upon the new movements to propagate their tales of hitherto unrecognized genius, thereby casting discredit on them.  Every collapse brings along intellectual and moral disorder.  it is necessary to create sober, patient people who do not despair in the face of the worst horrors and who do not become exuberant with every silliness. Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the will.  (172)

Common sense changes and adapts over time to the milieu.  It is not steady, and takes into account “scientific notions and philosophical opinions which have entered into common usage.  ‘Common sense’ is the folklore (that is, as it is understood) and the philosophy, the science, the economics, of the scholars” (173).

187–Ruling class ideas can be re-arranged into folklore, and then transferred from one person to another, and then made normal and real.  Gramsci also recommends folklore be systematically studied so educators can understand the environments they enter when they take teaching environments.  More than anything, Gramsci stresses folklore must be treated as real, not myth, nor superstition to be mocked and eviscerated by educators and intellectuals.  The divide between modern culture and popular culture (folklore) can only disappear if educators deal with folklore head on by using it to make more effective teaching methods.  It has to be taken seriously.

On page 198 Gramsci makes an interesting observation.  He links Marx’s historical materialism and the modern judicial system (the use of evidence, reason, and juries instead of torture and confession).  It seems he’s claiming there’s a connection–that Marxism is part of a larger social movement.

Military leadership has to drum up support from the masses in time of war.  It’s not just strategy a general must worry about, but also morale of his troops and his citizenry (198).

211–schools and pedagogy.

213–three types of war and how Ghandi’s work in India matches all three.

220–bold war (arditismo) and the difference between what was happening in India and Ireland.

Political struggle and military war…Political struggle is enormously more complex: in a certain sense it can be compared to colonial wars or to old wars of conquest when, that is, the victorious army occupies or intends to occupy permanently all or part of the conquered territory.  In that case, the defeated army is disarmed and dispersed, but the struggle continues on the terrain of politics and of military “preparation.”  Thus, India’s political struggle against the English (and to some extent that of Germany against france, or of Hungary against the Little Entente) knoes three forms of war: war of movement, war of position, and underground war.  Gandhi’s passive resistance is a war of position, which becomes a war of movement at certain moments and an underground war at others; the boycott is a war of position, strikes are a war of movement, the clandestine gathering of arms and of assault combat groups is underground war…Therefore, in these mixed forms of struggle, which have a fundamentally military character but are above all political (every political struggle, however, always has a military substratum), the use of the arditi requires the development of an original tactical concept for which the experience of war can provide only a stimulus, not a model…These forms belong specifically to [weak but exasperated] minorities opposing well-organized majorities, wheras modern arditismo presupposes a large reserve force, immobilized for various reasons but potentially effective, which supports and sustains it with individual contributions. (219-220)

College Composition and Communication
1965-1969

1965

Vol 16 No 1

This volume seems primarily concerned with how the to make student-writers speak in ways that are more expressive, but not necessarily in ways that speaks of their experiences outside of the university.  It’s all couched in humanist scholarship, a connection to literature, and a way to stop the continued “dehumanizing” of students—a preference and impetus for technical, professional writing; writing that does not “understand” or pass judgment on the world around the student writer (see the saved PDF by Virginia something or other).   This judgment, of course, should be based on the values of the humanities.  This issue seems to connect back to the talk with Steve about Corbett and Corbett’s ability to influence several rhetoricians to return to classic humanist endeavors and stay away from the political.

Look up the modes.  There’re four.[BJB1]

Vol 16 No 2

Milic brings up the Kitzhaber report in is article (66-67).  It seems the justification for the statement there is no agreement about what makes a good composition class, but there is the feeling that the quality level of writing must be brought up.  There is no real idea about how this is done.  Does the settling on a political pedagogy come from a desire to give shape and form to the discipline as something different from the free-floating, service-course iteration of composition that was so popular until the social turn?   It seems there’s a return to rhetoric, and talk of rhetoric having been “dumped in the wastebasket” back in the 20s and 30s.  Is this move back to rhetoric part of the reason Corbett is so inviting?  Ancient rhetoricians did not actively partake in politics, but taught those who were going into the ruling class.  To do this, they often spoke of topical things and pressed their students to work through these issues.

Wilcox is emblematic of the drive to use literature as the template for good writing.  It makes sense as he was most likely trained in a traditional English department.  The focus is clarity and style, both of which are separate from content.  Using “the best” as the template would seem a logical step, and a decent alternative to skill and drill exercises or 17^th century modes.  This was also the way to avoid the topical, though.  I don’t think it had so much to do with an aversion to politics but more of an attempt to avoid jargon and slang of the day as directed by such “authorities” as Strunk and White (see current issue of CE, Prendergast’s essay).

Whitlock–There is the general idea that the transmission of culture is important, and happens only in these Freshman Composition courses.  This occurs using the canon, and using the canon ensures the ideas of the West are implanted even the future scientist, engineer, or entrepreneur.

Lots of talk about Croce.  He is the one, supposedly, pushing the idea that content and form are inseparable.  Milic points out this causes problems, since it makes the composition instructor useless.  The message is in the form, there is no way to change said form, or edit it to make it more palatable.

Tibetts is a bit rough, too much like Livatowski from Collin’s class.  I think I understand why Steve is asking me to read this time period; he wants me to understand the lay of the land when the social turn occurred, and understand the pedagogies I’m ready to burn in effigy are—unequivocally—more progressive and global than what came before it.  The stress here appears to be on the traditional, male college student and composition as an art with no real discipline, research, or articulation of what a quality composition program is and should do.  In ’65, it’s all tied to the idea of writing like those in the canon, a way to pass cultural and literacy practices that would mark a student as “cultured,” as part of the ruling elite.  The creation of remedial classes, of writing centers or lab, signifies wasted resources on the people who shouldn’t be in the university—according to this worldview.

Rohman talk about writing as a process, and focuses on the pre-writing stage.  It’s the invention stage, but he incorporates meditation and the jargon of psychology to talk about it.  I don’t agree with all that, but it’s a step up from the other stuff in this issue.

Vol 16 No 3

In “Very Like a Whale…” Gorrell advocates using rhetoric, even the “new” rhetorics appearing around this time, over literature and grammar as the core of a composition course.  He stresses the rhetoric must cover all aspects of composing, and should not turn the course into seminar on rhetorical theory.  He’s calling for the use of rhetoric in a way rhetoricians in the past would have taught it: as a heuristic to create and share knowledge.

“The Contemporaniety of Classical Rhetoric” is a good example of the new rhetoric.  In this article Richard Hughes explains how Aristotle’s work champions argument, subsuming all the other modes, as a way to achieve probabilistic reasoning.  Meaning and direction are achieved through argumentation, not reliance on positivistic facts.

“Writing and Speaking” by Newman and Horrowitz could be talked about as part of the social turn since they discuss writing and speaking as communication and a communicative act.  Speaking doesn’t need to follow prescribed grammar to have more depth and effectiveness.  This would seem to push against traditional ideas that writing and speaking are one and the same thing, and that a student who can not write in ASE is unable to use other modes of communication effectively.  This would mean a valuing of students’ languages and, possibly, students’ writing not connected to the classroom.

Richard Braddock’s “Crucial Issues” is tying the composition classroom to social/political issues outside the classroom, and talks about the writing of themes as practice for civic participation.  This seems very social turn-esque.

“Familiarity in the Addison Familiar Essay” by Phillip Stevick follows right after Braddock’s and makes no attempt at connecting its subject matter to the present day, or students in any contemporary composition classroom.

Interesting note: MIRD in the corner talk session.  It’s some kind of multiple choice device for teaching grammar and style in remedial English (English A, in fact).  More of an effort to teach students of all levels than Tibbett, but still a bit creepy.

Vol 16 No 4

Is some guide for someone looking to pursue grad work in English studies.  Nothing really there.

Vol 16 No 5

James Moffet’s “I, You, and It” is a psychological approach to teaching writing.  He uses a lot of Piaget and Vygotsky to support his cirriculuum of writing assignment which mimic psyc theories about speech development and the concept of self versus the other.  Social turn but not social.  It’s a move looking at the student’s writing as part of a larger issue of development, not culture.

There’s lots of linguistic approaches and talk about how linguistics can make style an understandable and describable trait of any composition.  There’s a few articles like this, and it seems implied the instructor will somehow apply this to the composition classroom.  This seems (I hedge since I’m reading these short articles so quickly) based in the notion of a larger, essential style of speech and writing—a style which can be revealed to students by the savvy instructor.  This linguistic analysis relies on using poetry or literary prose as the subject of analysis.  When will these linguistic methods shift to social linguistics?

“The Staffroom Interchange” at the end of this issue has an interesting idea about modules and testing to tailor courses to an individual student’s needs.

In this interchange is talk about teaching African American students how to speak ASE.  It’s sounds draconian, but isn’t much different than what we do now without such direct instruction.  Is it impossible for comp-rhet to do anything like Gutierrez due to its subject matter?  Gutierrez has degrees in government and political science.  Those have actual, tangible, and discrete corollaries outside the university.  While rhet-comp may touch on everything and under-gird everything, that’s the problem.  It touches on everything.  Or, is this me falling into the trap of thinking rhet-comp’s only purpose is to teach freshman composition?  With real course offering through an undergraduate major, is it possible to view our work as something with corollaries outside the university?  If so, what is it?  And how do we claim it?

1966

Vol 17 No 1

There is the belief in training in classical rhetoric will make written communication more graceful and adept.  This is summed up in Marshall M Brice’s “Lincoln and Rhetoric” in his conclusion, and seemed supported by the articles preceding it, with their concerns about the paragraph and how to construct a pleasing one, and how to teach what a pleasing paragraph is.

There’s a return of the hard humanist scholar-critic who sees professional communication and journalism as the march towards some fascist state (Foley and Ayer, “Orwell in English and Newspeak”).  Was this rejection of professional communication somehow tied with the idea of open admissions and non-traditional students? I’m sure this is still the era where the humanities was charged with ensuring Western culture be taught to college students.

“Breaching the Abstraction Barrier,” by Paul C Rodgers, is very Strunk and White.  I understand what he means by the inability of student writers to engage, be analytical, and defer judgment through the use of the passive voice coupled with abstract terms, but at the same time, this would be learned through years of being told they know nothing, they are only students.  Again, more gatekeeping.

In this issue’s “Staffroom Interchange” there is more talk about methods for working with the “cultural disadvantaged negro student.”  Again, there isn’t really all that much talk in the journal proper about these students, but it would seem there is a turn in pedagogy happening outside the journal proper.  This, from what I’ve read in other times, was the section where composition instructors in the trenches wrote and explained what they were doing in their immediate locale to deal with whatever challenge and encouraged other with similar challenges to do the same.  I suppose the social turn came from the margins, literally, in Cs (these are found in the back and all run together—they aren’t given space like the articles in the center of the journal).

Vol 17 No 2

Open with more crap about culture, annunciation, cultivation, and the like.

Vol 17 No 3

More talk about Croce by Milic.  Croce and organic writing—style is not separate from content.

Staffroom Interchange: Talk about the draft status dependent on grades.  First time it’s been mentioned, but it would make perfect sense.  By 1966 we’re heavily involved in Vietnam.  The context for this is grades and comments.  It seems strange these issues have been talking about paragraphs, style, and handbook when there’s a war going on, but then again, it isn’t much different from now.

Vol 17 No 5

There’s a lot of talk about style, about the surface level combination of words to make something pleasing or elegant.  Cs at this point, in the main section of the journal, seems more like communiqués between established, professional writers discussing the art of composition.  The Staffroom Interchange, on the other hand, appears more about the nuts-and-bolts of working with students.  That’s where the student is mentioned as some one who must be dealt with.

“Surgery for the Research Paper. Or a Bomb” discusses the inability of composition courses to teach Freshman exactly what they should do to research for their specific curse of study.  Kissane suggests we can teach them how to think through things, to respond cogently in writing when faced with a problem which required research, to even learn the basics of research at the university, but teaching them how to write research papers acceptable within their individual courses of study should be a weight given to those disciplines.  Funny how this is still being talked about in the same ways and terms even now.

“Reflections on the State of Our Knowledge on Terminal English” is interesting.  The highlight is the articulation that “college education is now considered a right, not a privilege” (paraphrase), and therefore, college is not someplace where only the best go to perform.  It seems this is the crossroads where comp has to decide is it a gatekeeper or is it a device to set students up for success?  The article reminds me of Ira Shor’s work we read for Steve’s class.  It focuses on junior colleges, and the question becomes whether to develop comp classes designed to get students up to speed or comp classes designed to flunk them out (“terminal” English).  Even more interesting is the excerpt from Time magazine at the end of the article praising Armed Forces training for its cutting down of all “unnecessary” language when it comes to teaching, the use of film, audio-visual aides, overheads, practice before theory, the leveraging of the military hierarchy, and the pressing need to be prepared for war.

“Speak, See, Hear: The Needs of the Terminal Student” is pretty class driven.  Terminal English is defined in this piece as those who won’t transfer from a JC to a four year university, and therefore, they’ll only be taking an English course not designed for transfer credit.  The whole thing is Foucauldian in the sense it’s everything Foucault talks about in Discipline and Punish as the goals of a factory owner.  There is no possibility of organic intellectuals here.

“A Preliminary View of the English Teacher Preparation Study” is full of high-handed bullshit.  The talk is about English and filled with references to the English Literature canon.  It’s amazing common folks want to return to the standards of the “good ole days” without actually knowing the good ole days were bad for common folks like them.  The fella talking in this article doesn’t care about composition, or students, or even effective language use.  It’s all about maintaining a distance and position within an exclusive institution.

1967

Vol 18 No 1

The first article of this issue makes some good points concerning grammar, and asserts as its closing claim that reading and writing together over a life time, not just a semester long course, make the difference in producing “good” English compositions.

“All Good Writing is Creative” seems to be the first to hint at post-structural positionality as important to writing of any sort.  The piece is taking a crack at the vaunted idea of objectivity in a very folksy, creative writing sort of way, that is, no heavy theory but examples from the canon coupled with commonsensical observations.

“Functional Self Instruction” is modular pedagogy using the ideas of behavioral psychology to teach writing (it talks about developing a series of test which get the “right reflex” and prompt specific actions of reflection by the student writer deemed good by the author).  Is this one of the first cognitive articles to hit Cs?

Again, the most interesting things when it comes to teaching writing are found in the “Staffroom Interchange” section of the journal.  The rest of the journal akin to a scientific journal; the writers in the journal proper deal with the substance of their field and do not discuss the teaching of the subject to undergraduates.  This seems odd considering this field has always been about teaching undergraduate composition.  Perhaps this is part of the social turn, too?  The foregrounding of pedagogy as the concern of the field?

Vol 18 no 2

“The Effect of a Negotiated Contract on the Relations of the Faculty to the Administrator” is a weird entry for Cs at this time.  This issue is filled with more blather about style, and grammar, and testing; but this article is suddenly in the middle.  It pleads for faculty to organize through their own assemblies and not join a union which would define them as “labor” and the administrators “supervisors” since it would make an artificial distinction where the natural harmony of colleagues working together to educate the best and brightest students is disrupted.  It’s another artifact displaying the classist ideas floating about the field at this time.

“Remedial English in Junior Colleges: An Unresolved Problem” promotes specific remedies.  Also, this is the umpteenth article on the JCs I’ve seen since taking this trip down memory lane.  Are JCs still this prominent in Cs, or is this part of the milieu (the Great Society)?

“Will the Real Terminal Student Please Stand Up” is a strange mix of defining the label given to students not transferring out of the JC and pedagogy for teaching sections labeled “remedial.”

“Improving the Reading and Writing Skills of Disadvantaged College Freshman” has some interesting points.  It promotes using materials students can see as connected to their lives, and therefore, something they want to read.  It promotes reading, writing often, and class discussion.  But, it also promotes the instructor “denying the student’s home dialect” and actively discounting it as substandard.  These last three articles seem to signal a change in how students, pedagogy, and students’ interests/needs/goals are taken into consideration, but it still isn’t something I would call part of the social turn due to its vestiges of belief in ASE and eradication of home language/culture as the first step to liberating students.

Vol 18 No 3

Project English reads like a failure.  It’s history and funding is covered in the first article of this issue.

“Is it Time to Stop, Look, and Listen?” is hyperbolic crap.  It’s an exercise in being cute by making references to things humanists would think clever, and it really doesn’t say much at all.  I think this is the unfortunate reality of most of Cs at this time.

“The Reintergration of English” is a study narrating the obliteration of Freshman English as part of English Studies.  Also, it proudly proclaims, by the end, that English studies is still a properly department even without mandatory attendance through Freshman Comp.  This seems sad, since once times got tougher and funding dried up, and students were more concerned with working in the private sector, English studies fought to keep Freshman comp because it was a sure source of funding and a way to keep faculty working.  It’s completely oblivious to what ‘s coming in the near future.

The author also claims high school instruction in composition has gotten to the point where no equivalent class is needed the first year.  I wish s/he would have stepped back and looked at the university’s included in hir examples, eg, UCSD, Darthmouth, Univ. of Conneticut, Yale.

“Departures from Respected Traditions” is another installment of transformational grammarians arguing they’re just as good traditional grammarians.  Also, the plug for science in the humanities as a good thing.

“Shall-Will A Modern Analysis” is high handed and comes right after the grammarian talk  Not surprisingly, the one page article (a recitation of rules with examples of good and bad usage) was written by the then chief editor of Funk and Wagnalls Dictionary.

“What is Being Revived” by Edward PJ Corbett is close to what I’ve been studying all these years.  He’s touting Burke and asking scholars to take electronic media into consideration as a new form of communication and persuasion that requires its own set of rhetorical theories and parameters of judgment.  He also calls for a rhetoric of process over product, and since he’s talking in an era of composition as king (he’s writing in Cs for godsake!), I would say this is a pretty important turning point in the history of rhet-comp.  It seems this is the cresting of the wave; we’re getting closer to the social turn and a more apparent use of rhetoric in the composition classroom.

The report “Research in Composition” recommends the paragraph be the basic unit of composition and not the sentence.  This, I don’t think, was ever taken up considering how everyone is so mired in talking about the grammar of the sentence.  And here, let me emphasis not the semantics of the sentence, or if the combination of words we call a sentence matching the intention of the write, but the sentence’s adherence to usage rules prescribed eons ago with no support.  Just a list of “dos and don’ts.”

The report “Administration of Freshman English, Large University” is yet another written article professing high schools are doing a better job of preparing students for college writing.  I am going to guess the sample here is from the more exclusive, selective schools and open admissions had not occurred yet.

The report “Administration of Freshman English, Small College” reports the opposite situation, and mentions the use of “writing clinics” to mitigate the problems their students experience writing for a college audience.  I assume there will be a marked rise in “writing clinics” with the upcoming open admissions in large city universities.

Vol 18 No 5

Talk about Chomsky and his transformative grammar.  It’s more humanist versus the scientist, but to a lesser degree (“generation and deviation” LM Myers).  The whole thing seems to be a conversation about which is the better grammar: traditional or transformative (or all these others I’ve never even heard of).

Mark Lester—The Value of Tranformational Grammar in Teaching Composition—Lester does an excellent job of point out fallacies when it comes to using any type of grammar in the classroom, and gives the language its due.  He points out it’s hard to think we can tinker with students writing for 15 weeks and change everything they know and do when it comes to writing, even if we point it out by foregrouding rules and common practices. I like the way he talks about his in-class practices, eg, getting writers to understand issues of ambiguity by asking readers to try and guess what comes next in the sequence.  He does this to point out to the writer there is no superaddresse; she must try to imagine her audience and worry about clarity.

“Tutorial Composition” is a kind of Freshman comp based on CMC model of working with students.  The students set the pace and the professor works on what is their individual issues (organization, style, etc).  The group essentially revivals when there are disagreements about the meaning of a text and oftentimes correct the pattern errors (grammatical and logical) on their own.  The next Staffroom Interchange entry is called “Marist College Experiment in Interdepartmental Freshman Composition.”  It’s a WAC setup in a small college.  Again, both of these are built on the idea that their Freshman are ready to work in a more collegial setting.  Again, these events appear to be happening at exclusive colleges, not open admission schools.  There’s a lot of talk about elminiating Freshman comp up to this issue.  I think this must have been when schools were still dealing only with the elite coming from well-funded high schools.  This type of learning still can (and does at places like CMU) go on, but when the concern is teaching everyone ASE, then there is no chance for this kind of work.  The language used by the culture of power has to taught; those not from the culture of power must be reminded there ways of being and seeing the world are not valid via a writing class.

Vol 19 No 1 (1968)

“Teaching Students the Art of Discovery” is the first essay I’ve read in this retrospective which talks about pre-writing and thinking about a topic.  The writer uses ancient rhet as a justification for the practice.  More signs of the social turn and a move away from the modes?

“The Language of Rhetoric,” like “Teaching Students the Art of Discovery,” relies on Burke and Classical Rhetoric.  It, too, by its end is calling for a rethinking of how composition is taught by asking instructors to forget worrying about mechanics and grammar so much and focus on whether or not the student writer is saying something, is coming with an original insight, or is presenting a different viewpoint on a hitherto commonplace topic due to her position in society.  Also, notice both of these articles are talking about students and pedagogy, not appositives and gerunds.

Everything in this issue is talk about New Rhetoric and the invention, or the more comp term, pre-writing.  Also, the Staffroom Interchange deals a lot with asking students to write out, discuss, or make clear their process when it comes to writing their assigned themes.  It seems the classroom heuristic is coming into being instead of lectures on style or classroom discussions more germane to a literary analysis classroom.

The book review section is broken down into four distinct catagories: rhetoric, composition, and style; language and communication; literature; and teaching English.  It seems there’s a definite change coming as there is no subsuming of all of these under the umbrella of teaching composition.  Every camp is defining boundaries and getting ready to divide.

“The Status of Freshman Composition” argues for a specific set of criteria when creating or classifying a class as “Freshman composition,” and also lays out a plan for what an instructor working in the composition classroom should have training before entering the comp classroom.  It would seem this is the beginning of the professionalization of the field.  This, along with the next two sections entitle “Continuing Workshops” and “Commission on Composition,” are signs of a move by people at Cs and NCTE taking composition more seriously, and deserving of representation and continued support/space for research.  The concern at this point is understanding how people compose a text.  While it sounds social, there is still quite a bit of psychology being thrown around (think the milieu).  I can’t tell if the writers from this time period mean how in the sense of social-environmental practices and strictures or cognitively.

Volume 19 No 2

This issue opens with an in memoriam statement for Dr. MLK.  In the statement, the editor explains in years past they’ve considering dropping communication from the title of the journal, but with King’s assassination they’ve (the staff) have been reminded how important communication is to American society.

Kelly’s “Murder of the American Dream” is an outright affirmation of blackness and anger.  How important is this in the overall history of the Cs and STROL?

It seems there’s a backlash against the new rhetoric.  It’s seen as a pretender to the throne of linguistics.  Linguistics, for most of the writers in this issue, is the true understanding of the language.  At best, rhetoric should somehow be incorporated into a study of composition along with linguistics, but linguistics is the guiding force—not rhetoric.

“The Creative Process: The Relationship of the Musical and Literary Composer” attributes the composition process to a kind of mystical, divine relationship, but also expects the composer of both to keep in mind the audience she’s writing for so as to create a meaningful and resonate composition.  Sounds very expressivist.

“The Persistent Ptolemy and the Paradox of the Paragraph” is some of the worst crap to every appear in a journal.  It attempts to be cute and risqué, and explains in its own folksy way that writing is an art that is to be left to artist, but it’s just horrible fluff.  How did this make it into the Cs?

“Tentative Objectives for Remedial English” is a joke.  Ideas about what makes a good remedial class is based on the input of seven unidentified instructors.  Not only is the sample exceedingly small, it’s ludicrous to think any of them are reputable.  Probably a bunch of frustrated lit teachers “stuck” teaching comp.

The counter-statement to Wilcox in this issue is intriguing.  The person behind the statement, Howard K. Nixon, is more a prophet than he could have ever known.  Without the benefit of hindsight like I have, Nixon makes arguments which prove pretty accurate in the years that proceeded this publication.  Literature did not serve as the saving grace for English Studies, and rhetoric did prove more sturdy (and lucrative) than the survey classes focused on the canon.

Vol 19 No 3

“A Paradigm for Discovery” ask for a return to classic invention, and is something I would recognize as current composition.  It asks students to understand language is constructed and shapes our perceptions about reality, as well as question commonplaces about reality.  EM Jennings is also asking students try the middle ground of meaning making, ie, don’t be completely subjective nor completely objective.  The problem is that he doesn’t use post-structuralist theory to describe his ideas, so it’s rather convoluted.

Garland Cannon and Summer Ives’s “Some Generalizations about Language” reads like the foundation for STROL.  Dialectics are all of equal value, just some are favored.  All have their strengths, and most are community based.

After the reviews section a letter Ricahrd Braddock wrote to Mrs. King is printed.  Notably, he comments on the short-sightedness of the Cs and the field for not working with African Americans (in his letters he uses the term “Negros”) when it comes to studying dialects, nor taking in there ideas about African American dialects when studying African American dialects.  It would seem the Cs is getting closer to STROL; there’s even mention in this letter of Ken Macrorie explaining how comp teachers in their classroom can change ideas and attitudes about the commonplace social practices.  This would seem to be a large reason why rhet-comp focused on pedagogy and the university classroom.

The workshops are interesting as there’s talk about dialect, bi-dialectialism, and social values.  There’s even talk about teaching the general public learning—through rhet-comp and lingustics—that there’s no “right” version of English.  This talk goes on in the workshop about style and workshops 9a and 9b.

“The Preparation of English Teachers for the Junior College” is a report from CCCC that year.  There’s a lot of talk about the ghetto, preparing instructos to work with people from the ghetto, and screening potential instructors to ensure they don’t have middle class stereotypes built into their teaching philosophies.  There’s also mention these potential instructors have work in rhetoric, linguistics, and psychology as it pertains to language and identity formation.  More interesting: there’s a overt articulation of a PhD as being inappropriate for work at the JC level.  It’s reasoned the PhD is a research degree and not applicable to the teaching scene that most JCs are in their respective locales.  Toward the end a Master’s in Teaching with an emphasis on teaching composition—or at least in English studies—is hit upon as the ideal degree and qualification for working in the JC.  Funny these schools should have such an emphasis.  They don’t now.  Seems like it would connect to the Ira Shor book we read for Steve’s class my first year.  Conversely, the previous two reports dealing with technical writing have no concern for these issues of the ghetto and the “cultural disadvantaged” (as they called them at the time) students within their writing classes.  This is a shame.  I think the aesthetic of the technical writers won out as the humanities lost ground in the university as a popular course of study to more business and military focused courses of study.  We should have got everyone on board.

“Grammar study and the Composition Teacher,” another report, is awesome and something I think is still applicable today.  It stresses getting the student writer to work on things they’d find interesting, or at least something they can see as real college work and not busy work (I assume they mean endless themes).  They still feel the instructor should know how to perform grammatical analysis and be able to point out pattern erros and how to correct them and the general rules why those combinations are considered errors, but it’s also recommended the instructors do not throw rule after rule at the student.  They should focus on the student’s writing.

The report entitled “Continuing Education for English Teachers” is interesting as it shows an attempt by Cs to work with secondary teachers.  Most of the secondary teachers present think the English departments at the collegiate level don’t focus on teaching nor the teaching of writing and only on literary criticism; moreover the folks who came from the colleges to work with them due to Project English did not gear their presentations for the secondary teachers or the secondary classroom, and the applicability of linguistics and literary analysis were questioned as methodologies in the secondary classroom.

Another report: “Dialect Studies and Social Values” demonstrated how the “white is right syndrome” affects instructor perception of what makes for “correct” English versus “incorrect” English by playing tapes of speakers without sharing what race they came from in the American South.  Several white Southerners were deemed by the audience as using “Negro” dialects and therefore unacceptable speech.  When it was revealed the speakers were white, the presenting linguistic recommended terms be changed to describe non-ASE English since it created the unfounded stereotype that all “unacceptable” English was spoken only by people of color in the US.  This, it is covertly suggested, would most likely create more effective methods in teaching composition because it presented the issue as not a “racial” issue but as an American issue—one effecting white Americans as well as African Americans.

Vol 19 No 5

This issue opens with talk of African Americans and American Indians and an examination (or more like an explanation) of Af. American and American Indian students tendencies in a classroom setting.  It comes down to a social-historical explanation, and it’s very different then how the other issues up until 69 would have opened or even considered talking about students and student writing in Cs.

“A Comment on Our Situation at San Francisco State College” actually talk about scholars having to make a choice between violence and peace when it comes to social change.  DeVere E. Pentony makes the claim that nationalism is the direct outcome of cutting remedial classes and not creating any special courses to encourage minority enrollment nor support to keep minorities in school if they are admitted.  Nationalism is a way to respond to a system set against a people; the system exemplified by the university in this article.  In the second half of the article Pentony calls for a restructuring of how the university is run, one more transparent, open to change, and designed with official and civil ways to redress perceived or actual slights.  It would seem there was some brute force tactics used in at SFSU before the writing of this article, and while Pentony understand where this rage comes from, he still calls for a civil discourse so as to not allow the other side (the Klan and Birchers) to come into power using the same tactics.  In this short article he outlines what he sees as a good starting plan, and stresses the importance of open, civil discourse with the guidance of paternal faculty.

This article also demonstrates how highly everyone spoke of psychology at the time, or at least it was seen as the justification and rationale for specific actions by specific groups of people.  The disciplines name is used reverentially often throughout these years, and especially in this article.

“Prejuidice and Purpose in Compensatory Programs” is an attempt to rethink the university and the issues faced by America.  Greenbaum is calling out for the articulation of whiteness, how it operates, and how it’s a constructed identity with practices created by tradition, not any type of logic or basis in experiential reality outside of social life in the United States.  Greenbaum claims that without this understanding of whiteness, programs designed to help minorities will be nothing more than code for lowered standards, and moreover, only end up reaching a small number of people of color.  By the end of the article Greenbaum claims that racism against African Americans is only “the tip of the iceberg” and examining how African Americans are treated actually demonstrates the deeper problems exclusivity and classism in the United States; African Americans are more affected by this since it compounds the racism they experience.  Greenbaum argues for wholesale change in America, the epistemology of America, and the purpose the university is supposed to serve in America.  The university should study social problems by getting out into society and by redefining itself as an inter-disciplinary institution bent on making itself more accessible for the common good of society (ie stop being exclusive or making bombs).

“Hats off—or On—to the Junior College” is a long meditation on JCs establishing a solid ethos and deciding what’s important and not bowing to community pressure to keep the status quo.  This would mean being less pedantic and more critical (challenging middle class convention, ideas of grammar, and who should be attending college and for what reasons).  I would take it these moves to be less traditional is where the misnomer comes from that all academicians are liberal left hippies—at least in a time like now where there is a general yearning for a return to “traditional” values and standards.

There are some amendments at the end of this issue to Cs (the  conference body) constitution.  I wonder if these changes were utilized in some way special to them to make sure STROL passed.

There’s still some rather useless things in the issue, but it’s better than ’65.

1969

Vol 20 No1

This issue has nothing to do so far with race.  It would seem it’s about the rhetoric of electronic media.  It appears the journal has taken on its more current persona by this time; issues of critical race theory followed by issues of media/technology so as to provide coverage over what people are studying in the field.

Vol 20 No 2

There is some talk in this issue of political and social issues related to minority students.  One of them is “The Two Year College English Department in a Changing World.”  Here the California JC is praised for its desegregated and diverse student bodies.  Moreover, there is a sounding of the alarm: fewer and fewer students are enrolling in classes that will make them eligible to become teachers.  It seems the shift is on from the humanities into business and business related sciences.  The JC is praised as good institution because it already meets the general public’s insistence on relevant courses and courses of study plus has instructors of color working in its classroom; furthermore, its ability to reach students due to these factors and other physical factors like class size make the JC an institution fighting the good fight.

Donald M. Murray’s “Finding Your Own Voice: Teaching Composition in an Age of Dissent” is an essay pushing composition as the way to teach effective and responsible communication—the emphasis on responsible.  Murray asserts the persuasive methods used by several of the student organizations of the day was profane, even threatening, and the teaching of composition, with rhetoric, was a service composition could provide which would put the “civil” back in civil discourse.  The mission Murray envision for comp-rhet is the public service; a public service which prepares students to take part in a democratic republic.

McCrimmon in “Will the New Rhetorics Produce New Emphases in the Composition Class” argues the concreteness of what the student writer want to write about, the ability to describe it in a logical and rational way, is a large determiner in the writer creating not only useful content, but also readable and acceptable sentences about the writer’s subject.  McCrimmon focuses on the pre-writing stage (invention) as the way to make both things happen for a student writer.  The concept of invention is also tied into the writer coming to understand her audience through envisioning them and trying to create identification between her and her imagined audience.  This is how McCrimmon ties New Rhetoric into his article (think the example of the 3^rd graders writing about candle flame from James Moffet’s book).

This article is juxtaposed to William L. Taylor, the staff director of the US Commission on Civil Rights.  Taylor describes how even at this date, after the signing of the Civil Rights Act, there is still little integration in most schools and discrepencies among segregated schools when it comes to the quality, on every standard, between white and black schools is still huge.  Taylor closes with recommending the Federal Government spend more on education—100-160 billion—to create compensatory programs to get all schools up to a regulated standard.  It seems Cs is taking on the political role of advocate. Is the concern for civil discourse the reason the Cs and its members went towards a pedagogy/advocacy based solution?

There’s some weird pairing going on in the journal, as if to covertly say “this piece isn’t about politics or social issues, but let’s buttress it against something concerning social or political issues and see what you, the reader, can make of such a juxtaposition.”  Case in point: “The Relevance of Language Study” (yet another piece talking about how to balance linguistics, literature, and composition in a Freshman writing class) and the small advertisement for Ross and Maddox’s recent study published  in Childhood Education. The advertisement is entitled “Language Sensitivity” and it chronicles the terms African American prefer when they are referred to as a people.

The Staffroom Interchange section is filled with ideas concerning working with subject matter students care about and working in dialects, that is, teaching a student to understand the audience she is speaking and writing to, and based on that imagined audience, picking the right dialect so that audience identifies with you, and therefore, finds you trustworthy, knowledgeable, and someone whose opinion should be respected.

At the end of the issue is an advertisement for visual literacy.  This, coupled with the heavy references to MacLuahan, seems to point towards the rise of visual rhetorics within composition studies.  This appears important because it means composition is trying to see itesld as more than a service discipline, but a discipline that readies students for the modern world through allowing them to analyze and interpret the images coming out them through visual medium just like what comes at them in written mediums.  It goes back to the idea of making good citizens.

Vol 20 No 3

This issue appears to be the return of grammar and no mention of political or social issues.  I wonder if this is related to the American Heritage Dictionary article where the writing of the then new dictionary is discussed at length.  It’s nothing more than an announcement of the publishing, and is a type of advertisement, one which probably netted Cs a ton of money.  This could explain why there’s all this grammar talk in this issue.

“Hip Language and Urban College English” argues college instructors should at least think of “hip language” as living English and not the petrified English of the classroom and industry.  Interestingly enough, it actually mentions ASE as the language of the draft board, which is one of the few overt mentions of the Vietnam War in this whole sequence of issues.  Understanding hip English and discussing in class is not only a way to stay curious, but also a way to engage students to think about language as forming their identities, and therefore, a way to think about how the different dialects of English are used by different people to create different personas appropriate to their specific and respective goals.  There is no talk about identity, though, since this is the 60s.  There’s some talk about psychology.

“Logic: A Plea for a New Methodology in Freshman Composition” is the explication of Sidney Moss’ development of a pedagogy that moves away from the modes.  It sounds a lot like what is considered standard fare for comp courses.  Lots of how and why questions, with what he calls “finger exercises” being classroom heuristics and homework which is supposed to drive students to consider and analysis the shared text.  The emphasis is on persuasion, and moves completely away from the modal tendency of writing a theme totally based in argumentation, or totally in narration since both of those are not what happens in reality when a person has to make meaning and navigate experiential reality.

“Response to NUC Actions at CCCC and to Proposals” is the voice of the silent majority speaking up.  The arguments the professor makes are full of commonplaces, and he takes the ideas the NUC present to absurd levels.  Case in point: studying dialects.  I think the NUC is promoting composition study English the way linguists do; Doster is thinking composition is only a service course, and this would mean teaching all of these dialects to Freshmen.  That’s not what’s being said, but Doster is presenting it that way so as to defeat arguments without properly representing the NUC’s claims.  He’s practicing rhetorical fallacies throughout the entire counter-statement.  NUC=New University Conference.

Workshop Reports

“Using Rhetoric in Composition Courses” recommends the study of rhetorical systems in various “sub-cultures” (student protest movements, foreign cultures, ethnic and racial minorities in the US) which would allow the retooling of classical rhetoric to present needs of American society in toto.  It’s asserted in doing so rhetoric can not be a “dead” subject, something this conference committee felt had to be addressed because of the social upheaval going on in America society.  It seems the idea of making better rhetors to participate in civil discourse has taken hold; it also seems these folks believe movements have become so violent and vulgar in their suasive methods because they don’t understand how to read rhetorical situations.

The term “cultural rhetoric” is also used, and it’s agreed theories and scholars from outside English studies must be consulted when studying this area.

“Using Historical Linguistics and Modern Grammars in Compositions Courses” is a weirdly short report which only mentions it was a continuation of panel two, and that there was much talk of “black” dialect during this session.  Still, it seems ideas about African American English have come to the fore of many of the Cs participants.

“Using Popular Culture and Current Issues in Composition Courses” emphasized the issues of race, and for only the fourth time mentioned, the Vietnam War.  Moreover, the workshop emphasized texts demonstrating the history behind these issues.

Vol 20 No 5

This issue is entitled “Emphasis on Rhetoric.”  It opens with Corbett’s “Rhetoric of the Open Hand and Rhetoric of the Closed Fist.”  I’ve already taken notes on this in my blog, so I’ll skip it here.

“The Basic Aims of Discourse” by James Kinneavy stresses the completeness of discourse, discourse being defined as complete text of composition, oral or written.  Understanding it totally means understanding the overall message intended by the writer/ speaker; trying to understand only pieces of it (a sentence, a paragraph) and what the entire piece means is difficult in Kinneavy’s estimation.  Only by dealing with the entire piece can a reader understand the writer’s / speaker’s intent. Kinneavy asserts the splitting of the liberal tradition (persuasion to communications departments, logic to philosophy departments and grammar, that is literature, to English departments) has meant the inability for many people—and especially those people who are products of the academy—to participate in deviant forms of persuasion or expression.  Also, as a corollary, it means that each of the departments are seen  as useless since they only work in pieces, not as a whole, meaning their discourses are like the individual sentence or paragraph.  Nothing these three disciplines teach can be applied to experiential reality.

Nelson J Smith III’s “Logic for the New Rhetoric” does away with the concern that New Rhetoric is too audience focused and can be used to make unethical appeals.  Smith explains it can be, but so can classical rhetoric; both are tools and ethically neutral.  It is the speaker who makes the difference.  Also, using the example of Galleo, Smith demonstrates how speakers must work within an audience’s commonplaces and worldviews.  Relying on objective scientific fact often goes over the heads of audiences, and Smith points out this is a caution not only voice by Burke, but Aristotle, too.  Coincidently, Nelson is also arguing new and classical rhetoric aren’t all that different.

Logic comes into play when Smith explains logic as part of the invention stage of rhetoric.  The invention stage is the gathering of discrete bits of information, and logic is the study of the possible relationships which could be applied to these discrete bits once they are placed into a mental taxonomy of classes and entities.

Important terms describing how logic works with discrete bits of data (Conjunction, Alternation, and Implication are on 309).  All of this works with the ladder of abstraction.  Using the ladder allows for insights into topics of inquiry, specifically, the reclassification of an old class (using Aristotle and his taxonomy) into a new class through logical steps traced out by one or several interwoven ladders of abstraction.  The ladder of abstraction seems somewhat like a network.

“The logic of the speaker and writer differs from the logic of the scientist in that it takes its premises from the preconceptions and prejudices of the audience rather than from the generalizations of a legitimate empirical induction” (313).

“Can White Liberals Teach Black English in Negro Colleges in the South?” seems confused, as if the writer (Robert H Swenes) is using the space of the article as therapy.  He never explains how he has this information, which leads me to believe the entire article is based on his experience at different Southern and urban colleges where the students were predominately African American.  He isn’t really talking about Black English, and he has the tone and worldview of the Cs essays from the early 60s.  The students, by his estimation, aren’t very innately intelligent, and the Black English is seen as inferior to ASE.  Before this came some horrible article about word association (From Word Associations to More Interesting English Compositions by Roger Wilcox).  Wilcox argues the disadvantaged students (code for AA) are incapable of performing word association exercises correctly.  After looking over his directions and the sample exercise he gives, I can’t run through the exercise and produce the desired results!  This isn’t a question of innate intelligence, it’s about knowing the structure and rules of the exercise, and then exploiting it.  The word association is analogous to riddles or puzzles, not some test which quantifies intelligence.

This issue is a strange mix of New Rhetoric and a backlash against the egalitarian moves made by Cs immediately following King’s death.  The first staff room interchange essay, entitled “Remedial English at an Open-Door College” nostalgically paints the recent past as a time where teachers could use the “tried and true methods” of shared class reading, analysis/discussion in class, assigning of theme, correcting theme, returning theme since “all the white, middle-class students spoke English and we did not have to teach the language.” What perfect time is Jacqueline Griffin referring to, even in 1969?  In 1965, before the move for open admissions, there were numerous articles complaining about students and their writing.

Students Rights to Their Own Language

CCC
1974
Vol 25 No 3

Intro refers to the 60s as the final push to listen to “submerged minorities” concerning non-standard dialects.

“Lack of reliable information, however, seldom prevents people from discussing language questions with an absolute air of authority” (1).

“What’s really the hearer’s resistance to any unfamiliar form may be interpreted as the speaker’s fault” (4).

“We do not condone ill-organized, imprecise, undefined, inappropriate, writing in any dialect; but we are especially distressed to find sloppy writing approved so long as it appears with finicky correctness in “school standard” while vigorous and thoughtful statements in less prestigious dialects are condemned” (9).

Page 11 asserts the comp classroom should be a space where the handbook is used as a moment of rhetorical training—showing how the idea of correctness is not always applicable according to the rhetorical situation. Also, it explains the instructor’s obligation to utilize the dialect switching students already do, but it also stresses making students aware of how they do it, why they do it, and how those skills they’ve already learned through osmosis can be used in the academy.

“[T]here is little evidence that languages “evolve” in the sense that they become more expressive or more regular; that is, they simply change, but they do not, it seems, become better or worse” (18).

The rest of this issue is the bibliography of text which forms the philosophy behind the SRTOL proclamation decreed by the 1972 CCCC Executive Committee. The section the quotes and notes above refer to is an explanation of various topics covered by SRTOL. Basically, it’s a FAQ.

The Hope and the Legacy: The Past, Present, and Future of “Students’ Right to Their Own Language”
Patrick Bruch and Richard Marback

Introduction

The intro opens with a solid articulation of what several who teach composition belief is the possibility of composition: “writing [is] a resource for and an activity of, critical hope…[meaning] using reason to pursue the faith that people can ‘re-conceptualize themselves as active citizens capable of altering terms of debate and structures of power that bear down on their lives’” (vii). “Students’ Right…” is the foundation of this belief, and rather quickly Bruch and Marback point out the problems between the sentiments expressed in the resolution and the actually practices following the adoption of the statement by CCC and NCTE in 1974.

Despite a moment of cohesion among what we know, what we do, and what is right, compositionists have been largely unable to make good on the hope of “Students’ Right.” For more than 25 years, the legacy of “Students Right” has deferred the hope that we might bring teaching and research together in composition studies to craft a paradigm for addressing in the classroom the social consequences of language discrimination. (viii)

Brauch and Marback mention Steve Parks and Parks’ belief this state of affairs has been created by the continual drafting and composing and defending of SRTOL as leaving the CCCC Executive Committee unable to articulate a way SRTOL could be deployed in the classroom and in scholarship.

Richard Ohmann takes the opposite position, noting SRTOL never became the foundation for the CCCC, but still changed the tenor and practices of composition as a discipline and as a teaching subject. The practitioner-scholars in the field, according to Ohmann, moved from an obsessive focus on “correctness” to more critical scholarly positions and pedagogical orientations.

This book is built on the premise that “revisiting the resolution and reflecting on its legacy” (xiii) allows for the teacher-scholars in comp-rhet to decide what the future work of comp-rhet will be.

The book is made up of four sections.

1. “The Context of ‘Students’ Right’.”  This section contains five previously published essays that describe the context the resolution was launched in.
2. “Initial Responses.”  This section contains four essays highlighting the initial reaction of teacher-scholars working in comp-rhet in the ’70s.
3. “The Second Wave of Reflection and Engagement.”   The essays in this section demonstrate the persistence of language rights issues and characterize major developments within composition studies as engagements with “Students’ Right.”
4. “The Lasting Legacy” contains essays written especially for the anthology, each essay addressing contemporary issues in composition studies through the lens of “Students’ Right.”

“The English Language is My Enemy”
Ossie Davis

Davis challenges the idea that education can mitigate racism in America. For the most part it’s too slow because it only works on one student at a time, as well as it making said student a victim receiving charity. He also highlights the problems of “Standard English” in this context. After fore-grounding the importance of community action and en masse protest as a way to achieve gain for African Americans, at the end of the essay Davis is questioning a standard dialect helps African Americans since it is loaded with derogatory synonyms for the word “black,” and therefore, can do nothing to help a child who is black figure out a position of strength to work from as she navigates American society.

“The Politics of Bidialectalism”
Wayne O’Neil

O’Neil’s major claim is that bidialectalism is just a hoax made to appease African Americans but in the long run not changing the status quo. For O’Neil, the system must be shaped by African Americans and forced to recognize their dialect of English as on par and just as “correct” as white English.

“Bi-Dialectalism is Not the Linguistics of White Supremacy”
Melvin J. Hoffman

Hoffman makes a strong argument for the providing students with a choice when it comes to the dialect of English to speak, and yet he seems to not fully take into account the arguments of Sledd and Kochman. Hoffman acknowledges Sledd and Kochman want sweeping social change–the type of change which would make questions of dialect obsolete– but Hoffman never deals with the difference between his claims about why bi-dialectalism should be taugh in schools and Sledd and Kochman’s claims for changes beyond the classroom. It’s almost two different conversations. Sledd and Kochman are discussing the classroom and moving outward in an attempt to demonstrate how the classroom is the outcome of a larger network of social/political forces; Hoffman seems adamant about staying in the classroom and working with individual students on gaining access through literacy and mastery of ASE.

“The Shuffling Speech of Slavery: Black English”
J. Mitchell Morse

This essay is troubling. Morse is refreshingly straightforward with his belief the university does change people, that it does ready them to move in the circles of society often considered effete and snobbish in students’ home communities. Morse sees teaching ASE as teaching critical literacy and therefore fostering the possibility of social change, and at the same time uses his ideas concerning psychology as a way to tie Black English (or any regional/ethnic variation from ASE by any group of people in the US) as a sign of cognitive disability; he seems to discount the ability of ASE to project a version of experiential reality which precludes progressive change by the cultural values speakers implicitly and covertly tie to ASE. This in turn deflates his argument that teaching ASE is teaching critical literacy–and this coupled with some of his specious pieces of “evidence” (personal, unverifiable events he encountered abroad; his hearing one speaker discussing Black Power as the foundation for his outlook on all proponents of radical social change) make his essay a mechanically pleasing text, but ultimately a flawed argument where his underlying classist-racist warrant for the continued teaching of ASE is made readily apparent.

Section Two: Initial Responses

According to Bruch and Marback, SRTOL became available in a society where definitions about equality, racial justice, and difference were avoided. This, in turn, meant SRTOL was discussed in polemic terms, that is, as an either/or proposition about what should be taught in the nation’s English classes. Consequently, and in part due to the wording of SRTOL, classroom instructors–at all levels–had no real way to engage with the statement and develop pedagogies taking SRTOL into account with backlash from various camps. The resolution was “met with confusion and even disdain” and at the time was “passed over as a vehicle through which to rethink the profession” (51).

The first essay highlights how SRTOL’s emphasis on issues of dignity, power, and identity should inform the discipline’s research and teaching did nothing to guide practitioners’ and the public’s focus on how to balance those elements with other matters (here I think they mean access to the university and employment). The last three discuss different ways SRTOL situates writing teachers and their obligations to civic and social life, each with its own recommendation on how to take up or discount what SRTOL advises compositionists to do.

“The Students’ Right To Their Own Langauge: A Dialogue”
Stephen N Tchudi
Susan J Tchudi

The dialogue is a bit too convenient, so either it’s heavily edited or an exercise in creative writing to display the varying positions of educators, linguists, parents, and journalists of the time. A good point comes from the dialogue, though. SRTOL basically says “do no harm” but it doesn’t say you can’t actively teach students to understand the history of language and the availability of choices based on that understanding. As the (fictional?) teacher in the dialogue points out, s/he has students writing and speaking all the time, has students working in “standard” English as well as talking about the rhetorical concerns of audience and when to apply the most handbook versions of English and when not to (60-61).

“A Contemporary Dilemma: The Question of Standard English”
William Pixton

Pixton argues standard English amounts to a moment of stasis, and therefore, because it cuts across all dialects of English within the US it’s a good dialect to have mastered. Also, with his convoluted intro, he intimates every speaker should understand who makes up their audience and use the dialect best suited to persuading/creating a moment of consubstantiality. Still, he relies on Morse quite a bit, and quotes Morse heavily throughout the text. There still appears to be this nagging, almost racist idea that language reflects cognitive ability. Psychology, and not New Rhetoric (which I’ve used in articulating the meaning and important beats of Pixton’s essay), seems to be the ideology under-girding the standard camp’s arguments.

“No One has a Right to His Own Language”
Allen Smith

A rant against SRTOL from someone who teaches belle lettres. It seems this is the reaction of most not trained in linguistics nor composition theory at this time. The arguments against are made by those who were trained literary analysis/appreciation. There are some valid points, but they’re venom is not really about SRTOL. It’s more about advocating why belle lettres is relevant to the contemporary student.

“The Student’s Right to His Own Language: A Viable Model or Empty Rhetoric?”
Jesse L. Colquit

Colquit asserts SRTOL is empty rhetoric since it comes with no clear direction on how to prepare educators how to implement the resolution in their classrooms, does not provide funding to train teachers in the field nor future teachers about what the statement means nor funding for pilot programs. Colquit recommends the multi-ethnic pedagogy already in use at some institutions (85) as the most viable way to make SRTOL a reality. This, though, requires funding and a plan.

Section Three: The Second Wave of Reflection and Engagement
This section deals with the reactions from compositionists working in the field during the late ’70s and the early 80s and in the milieu of a return to traditional values and the re-birth of political conservatism in the US. Bruch and Marback assert even though the essays of this section show compositionists as distant from the language of SRTOL (the ideals intimated by the language of the resolution were now associated with the excesses of the 60s and 70s and America’s failure in Vietnam and the embarrassment of Watergate) they’re still engaging one another with what it means–socially and politically–to teach writing.

“Toward Educational Linguistics for the First World”
Geneva Smitherman

This essay is built on three areas. 1) Theory and research; 2) policy and planning; 3) implementation and practice.

In theory and research Smitherman advocates a paradigm shift. She calls for a study of language, specifically Ebonics, which occurs in context and studies effective communication within that context. Understanding how speech and language (and loosing the prescribed difference between language and parole) work in the “socio-cultural, histrorical, experiential reality” (95) of speakers and language is more important than research deciphering how far a dialect is from the prescribed grammar of standard or what should be taught in a composition classroom.

Smitherman advocates the utilization of educators and linguists when it comes to making legislative policies about language education, and those educators and linguists should be doing work which helps people in some way, not adds to the corpus of text on a specific group’s speech practices to be used by those in the academy.

When it comes to implementation and practice, first and foremost Smitherman advocates the educators trained in English as a language, not in literature. Doing this negates the urge to fall back on tradtional, unsupported rules of grammar, and allows for the teaching of effective communication.

The three above points amount to liberation. Pedagogy and the classroom is a set of practices and the site for social and political change. Notice: most of the ideas of liberatory pedagogy so far have come from compositionist trained in linguistics.

“The Politics of Composition”
John Rouse

Rouse makes the argument Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations is more about making pliable students than preparing open admission students for writing at City of New York University. Citing the wielding of grammar as a new body of esoteric knowledge to replace the old esoteric knowledge of belle lettres, Rouse claims Shaughnessy ignores language theory and suggestions for teaching effective communication coming from linguistics (109). For Rouse this is inexcusable as it disregards good scholarship–scholarship Rouse sees as key to readying students who have so much pinned to a college education.

“The Politics of Composition: A Reply to John Rouse”
Gerald Graff

Graff makes the claim Rouse is too hard on Shaughnessy, and explains Shaughnessy’s methods could also be used to a more critical perspective on society–if the students take the lessons to heart and suddenly awaken like an enlightened Buddhist. These are my words, not Graff’s, but I do think there’s an element of liberal humanist thought at work here. The individual becomes enlightened by exposure to correct forms, and then is able to analyze and critique how those forms are deployed to create social strictures once they achieve an amount of mastery of those forms. While I can see Graff’s point of view, where I think he falls short is explaining those forms (grammar) would have to be overtly taught as forms of usage developed overtime and codified as correct by those in power before students would understand–no matter how cynical and jaded they may appear–it’s alright to criticize such an esoteric, mystical tradition such as grammar and punctuation.

“Writing Away from Fear: Mina Shaughnessy and the Uses of Authority”
Michael Allen

Allen gives a testimonial about Shaughnessy’s book, and the professional/personal epiphany he had while using her book to teach at Rust College in Mississippi. That’s it, or at least the what Allen is working up to. It is interesting how Allen, along with Graff, continually defend pedagogies that will prepare students for the job market, and therefore, free them from “child abuse, the gnawing of hunger, and the insanity inspired by poverty and fear” (129). This puts a lot of faith in an ever expanding, egalitarian job market where the ability to use edited English equates to a job that pays a living wage. I don’t deny this helps a student’s quest for gainful employment, but this is the crux of his argument, and the vantage point he stakes his flag on when trying to develop his written representation of self as a pragmatist while he paints Rouse as a belletristic snob who wants to only teach from the safe confines of a Tennyson poem. I don’t read Rouse’s essay this way (although I do get a little concerned when he talks about feeling and poetry); I think his position is more nuanced. Rouse appears to be more of a social critic with a pedagogy (and training) based in the literary canon.

“A Perspective on Teaching Black Dialect Speaking Students to Write Standard English”
Judith P. Nembhard

This is the least polemic, most sane, and most humane response to SROTL I’ve read in this text so far. It also ends with a list of suggestions when working with students who speak AAVE in the composition classroom (145-147).

Section Four: The Lasting Legacy

Bruch and Marback describe the early years of the 21st century in these terms:

The globalization of our social lives and of the workplace brings students with greater langauge variety in greater numbers into college composition classrooms. Greater diversity and greater awareness of differences have generated fear among many who have either adopted fyndamentalist convictions or vilified others. As much as we have become even more interdependent, we seem as a whole to become more intolerant. Today, as much as our world has changed in the last thirty years, the intolerance that has come to dominate political debate recalls us to many of the issues that concerned authors of “Students’ Right.” (149)

The essays in this section concern themselves with the issue of access to education, and each stakes SRTOL and tries to create a “trajectory that might draw us toward clarification of our places as teachers and researchers of writing in controlling the availability of society’s resoureces” (150).

“Speculations on Coalition Politics: Imagining the Collective Responsibility of the Students’ Right Resolution”
Steve Parks

Parks takes the position SRTOL was a document which, through its emphasis on language not just writing, called for coalition politics so as to argue for social and economic justice. Putting this in terms of the 2000 US presidential election, Parks explains “The goal was to ensure that individuals with alternative political and economic viewpoints (like Nader) are allowed to speak, and put some…alternative visions into practice” (152). Reading SRTOL in this fashion, Parks highlights the difficulties and possibilities of of SRTOL and re-imagine the public responsibilities of writing teachers.

Recounting the history of NUC, CCCC, and SDS, Parks demonstrates how these organizations have evolved or died according to the organizational identity they created for themselves. In the case of the NUC and SDS it was the creation of public ethos as advocates for a very specific segment of the US population which led to their eventually dissolution (well that, and the inability to perform various functions that would have protected their status as political action groups such as securing PAC status, finding funding, and hiring staff who could carry the organization full time). Parks finds hope in the more recent practices of activist groups which have a fluid identity and are often formed to deal with one specific event or cause; in these groups union member defend graduate students and their collective bargaining right; graduate students protest, along with developing world activist and union organizers, the use of sweat shop labor to produce university licensed clothing and apparel; graduate students (who may well also be union activist, from a developing nation, or queer) gather with union members, developing nation activists, and queer activists to protest the WTO and its policies.

Parks finds this organizing around a collective identity formed through negotiation and probabilistic reasoning hopeful, and while he points out this isn’t something Cs has done nor SRTOL defines as the driving force behind composition, he proffers refocusing attention on the section reading “The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another” (158). Using this section as the mission statement for 21st century composition, Parks asserts “A framework might then be developed intellectually and systematically within CCCC so that different political and identity-based caucsues and special interests can see how the continued attaks on nonprofit space…unite them” (158-159). This not only changes the tone and tenor of the discipline, but also affects and changes the writing classroom. The focus moves from the individual working on individual skills for individual profit towards discussion and production of texts which focus on the construction of collective identity, compromise, writing groups, and conflict resolution. This then fosters a focus on service-learning projects and the movement to create classes which emphasize working on issues outside the university–issues like the environment, education, and social justice (157). Essentially, this pedagogy pushes students to a deeper understanding of what language and writing do in the world, and how both can empower or disenfranchise.

“”Students’ Right,” English Only, and Re-Imagining the Politics of Language”
Bruce Horner

Horner uses the work of Bourdieu and others to demonstrate the fluidity and constantly changing identities of speakers and the how those identities are often tied to the language said speaker is using at that moment. Horner performs this act of illumination to point out that–contrary to SRTOL and the English Only movement–language is not a static thing nor does it denote a stagnant identity for a speaker. Identity and the importance of language changes in response to the interplay of history, economics, current events, and politics; a more fruitful, more nuanced study of composition (the donut shop example on 188) would have students and scholars tracing and describing how these factors change the meaning and power associated with each identity, and how those new versions of material reality are leveraged by the dominant hegemony.

“Dialect and the Discourse of Evaluation”
Barbara Schneider

Schneider describes the differences between assessment and evaluation in composition. Assessment is a descriptive practice instructors use when describing a student’s paper (the power of descriptive assessment, how it helps TA/new instructor deal with dialects different from their own is on page 208). Evaluation is ethical and political, and should be applied to writing wit large, ie, how we develop as a discipline and what values we attribute to writing, and how writing binds, constrains, and empowers different writers in the world within and beyond the academy (209).

English in America: A Radical View of the Profession
Richard Ohmann

Chapter one: Working in English in America, ca. 1965

Ohmann discusses the reasons for writing the book, how it was originally a different book altogether, and his belief there should be a moratorum on all publishing and conferences. Ohmann believes there should be a move toward more local/regional scholarship, more discussion about the uses and worth of English literary scholarship, and not the more science-esque model of numerous published monographs, national journals, national conferences, sub-fields, and esoteric specialties. Towards the end of the chapter, Ohmann confesses his prescription for a local/regional scholarship (which includes on-campus colloquia, local symposiums, and regional conferences) is based on the premise English studies teaches morality–and that through pointing out the moral value of works in the canon is a way to preserve the best, most ethical, and humane aspects of Western culture and pass it on to future generations. Then, Ohmann reveals the rest of the book will question this assumption; Ohmann feels this is preserving the best of Western culture and a humane worldview can not be the real work of the field since literature professors do nothing to stop the (then current) Vietnam War.

Ohmann appears to be grappling with his ideas about what the humanities teaches (exemplified by his use of the Frost poem and his accompanying analysis of said poem throughout the intro) and what is going on in the material world around him. He closes by making the claim the US academy, and in particular English studies, is part of a larger system social institutions which teach and reify the social order envisioned by the dominant hegemony.

I mean to criticize a position I will outline and simplify thus: literature–the best that has been thought and imagined and written–can serve the society in many ways. It tempers the hard rationality of science. It teaches moral and esthetic values in a world that otherwise aspires only to the material. It supports the individual person, against the powerful leveling force of a society of the masses. And it is an endless source of rich, vicarious experience, which permits us to imagine alternate worlds and criticize the present world…English classrooms are the front line of culture. (23)

Book outline page 25.
Chapter Two: examines the MLA convention as an initiation process into the field.
Chapter Three: analyzes AP English in the high schools and how it serves as a filter to determine who goes to college and who doesn’t.
Chapter Four: looks at ideas about literature that have dominated graduate programs in English studies, and how those texts have had a direct impact on the “most critical rite of passage of our profession” (25).

Chapter Two: MLA Professors in a Group

In this chapter Ohmann describes how Louis Kampf and his group of reformers (which I think was the NUC) caused a disruption (posting fliers in the convention hotel) at the ‘68 MLA Convention, Kampf’s subsequent arrest by the police, and his eventual election to the executive committee. Kampf was part of the New Left and felt the MLA should be more politically active; his move into power within the MLA and several of the MLA’s members outrage by his election (legally mind you) lead several prominent professors of the time (names unmentioned by Ohmann) to decide–and to make known through letters to PMLA and to the Executive Committee–the political apparatus was broken since Kampf was a part of it. For Ohmann this demonstrates two things: first, the MLA is not concerned with the ideas of free speech, democracy, and individualism as they profess to be; second, the idea of democracy is only adhered to as long as it refies the myth of scholarly meritocracy and the “stars” of the field hold positions of power within the MLA.

To represent the position of the MLA status quo, Ohmann quotes Sidney Hook. According to Hook, the undergirding warrant for all this anger is the concept of professionalism, as the term should apply to scholars. Hook asserts the scholar is not an advocate nor a dissenter. The scholar produces, in a truly disinterested fashion, useful knowledge which he then turns over to citizens. Citizens use that knowledge to make decisions about social/political issues, and at the same time, a scholar can be a citizen and participate in this process, but he must do so as a citizen–not in his social position as a scholar–and must certainly not use a professional organization like the MLA to broadcast his personal politics he brings to a convention from his role as a citizen.

Ohmann then picks apart this idea of professional and professional organization as disinterested, non-participating social identity and social gathering by listing all the way the MLA lobbied the Federal government to spend money or establish specific programs that eventually benefited the MLA, or how individual scholars used the pages of PMLA to urge the US government to take specific steps in dealing with certain events (44-50). Ohmann demonstrates this idea of neutrality is a false, and that professionalism is a shibboleth used by those who merely want to maintain the status quo at all levels.

This all very much like what Stephan Fuchs describes in Against Essentialism, and how social networks work to maintain their structural and ideological status quo.

Chapter Three: Advanced Placement on the Ladder of Success

Ohmann describes how preparation for and the taking of the AP English test is a way to promote a specific set of practices when responding to literature, and a specific set of ways of thinking and being within society. These sets of practices and ways of being/thinking all promote the creation of docile bodies; the authorities in control of this test (the ETS) only reward persons who are conventional and produce non-threatening interpretations of various canonical works. Any take on literature must be wholesome and detached, and no answer (or question writtend by ETS, for that matter) should promote the literature being discussed may have challenged the status quo of it time, advocated (or even advocates) social upheaval, and could possibly connected to the present day milieu. Ohmann describes this test as having the approval of university English professors since it defers to their authority, pays them handsomely, and doesn’t ask them to teach anything–just consult, maybe read and critique, or possibly play the role of table judge for questionable student essays. Ohmann concludes this is the combining of professionalism (defined in the previous chapter) with institutional social stratification. He closes the chapter by imploring people to discontinue their critique of standardized tests and turn their fury onto American society itself:

It is short-sighted to let criticism rest with demanding IQ tests be color-blind or class-blind, and it is short-sighted to ask that College Boards and Advanced Placement programs place as many poor and minority people among the elect, since society will un-elect them soon enough. We should understand what we are up against: not tests that are arbitrary, but a class society that requires such tests. No attack on these rites of passage can be finally successful unless it overturns bourgeois culture, itself, and the rule of our dominant classes. (65)

Chapter Four: Teaching and Studying Literature at the End of Ideology

In this chapter Ohmann describes how liberal humanist ideology, English studies, and the economic well-being of the professorate. It comes to down the ability to stay aloof and the refusal to connect literature to the social processes of continuing capitalism and the consumer society. In refusing to do so, in the 1950s, literature professors (the New Critics and their adherents in particular) to separate themselves from anything controversial. This move for the status quo–coupled with bourgeois ideas about the market as the major form of all social transactions and the liberal humanist concept that poetry is inviolate–ensured the creation of an English studies which promoted the America of the dominant hegemony.

This idea is connected to the concept of poetry as encompassing everything but too esoteric to be a heuristic for creating real world action, and the concomitant idea that forcing poetry to do so would somehow destroy its ability to speak the “truth” about reality. A combination of time, place, and academic discourse ensured English studies would not become a source for radical social change–especially when the scholar-teachers of the discipline had a vested economic interest in seeing only the positives of the United States.

See 88-91 for exceptionally harsh criticism of American bourgeois culture.

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