politics, history, identity, change, composing

My subject title is an attempt to mark out the pivot terms in this set of addresses. You get a sense in this group that the politics of literacy is integral to composition's formation, mission, and development. The political consciousness you see in a number of these pieces (Hill, Purnell, Chaplin, & Lunsford) is to me central to "the idea" of composition. Much scholarship since the 80s has sought to make visible buried rhetorics, literacies, ways of doing language in order to demonstrate the myriad ways in which language/speaking are tied up with identity and composing in the broad sense that Lunsford outlines. I really like her formulation, by the way, because she gets us thinking about composing as a primary act of being and being recognized, not simply a "process" of writing. She helps us see that there's a lot at stake in the act of composing--it can mean the difference between presence and absence. If no one takes up the work to compose Diotima, then women's long-standing role in rhetorical theory remains under-developed, and so forth.

You also see in these addresses comp's preoccupation with its own identity. The consensus seems to be that we do well to remain fluid, to resist static definitions and boundaries. Again, as in the first set of addresses, nearly all of the authors appeal to our interdisciplinary heritage as a strength, not something that fractures our work. This hybrid identity still captures the energy and variety of the field and, in my view, generates interesting ways for the field to continue to be relevant.

I like all of these addresses a lot. Too much to say, so I'll just end by saying that I find Hairston's speech provocative to the max! What a thing to say aloud and in print! Her speech seems a capstone to the views expressed in the earlier addresses (the suspicions about "the enemy," the sense of us vs. them, etc.). You get a real sense of the discipline's struggle to become, and this piece helps to grant an understanding of why there has always been tension between comp and lit (something that I think has changed dramatically over the past 5-10 years as more and more scholars come out of training programs that emphasize both areas).

A choice quote from H. about writing teachers do: "As writing teachers we are engaged in a dynamic and loosely-structured activity that involves intensive interacton with people. It is an activity that is tied to living language, that shifting and ambiguous medium that won't stand still to be examined and is never pure, and it is an activity that focuess on teaching a process for which there are no fixed rules and no predictably precise outcomes" (139). I couldn't agree more.

Last thought: history is important to many of these scholars. The early 90s saw a formidable movement around rewriting histories of rhetoric, excavating archives and uncovering lost histories in order to enlarge our understanding of rhetoric and its legacy.