Friday, February 5, 2010

Murray as WPA?

Today, skimming through

Memoranda of Fragile Machinery: A Portrait of Shaughnessy as Intellectual-Bureaucrat (Mark McBeth) WPA: Writing Program Administration Volume 31, Numbers 1-2, Fall/Winter 2007

I'm trying to keep a look out for articles about important figures in comp. I've not read a lot of them, but I'm thinking that reading the ways in which others have dealt with important figures, like Murray, might be good for my own emerging project.

McBeth raises one interesting thing for me when he announces that his project will be a consideration of Mina Shaughnessy as WPA. I think that Don Murray did, at one point, serve as the WPA at UNH, but I don't know for sure and if he did serve in that capacity, I have no sense of what that period was like.

McBeth frames his project thus:
Although compositionists have often revisited her legacy, they do not thoroughly acknowledge her role as writing program administrator and, as a result, our representations of her remain historically blurred and biographically unfinished. In addition, an exploration of her role as WPA reshapes the critical positions of those ensuing critics who identified the less positive effects of her particular subjectivity to writing instruction. Ultimately, revisiting her work as a WPA recasts her portrait as a founder of composition studies, and reshapes her historical identity in composition.
According to a biographical note in the article Don wrote with Les Fisher, as of 1973, Don did serve as "Chairman of Freshmen English." To the best of my knowledge, no one has written about Don's work as a WPA. I wonder what's in the archives...? UNH? Poynter?

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.