Rhetoric Revival or Process Revolution? (Fleming)

Fleming begins by identifying this problem:

But if, as a discipline, we display extraordinarily avid interest in and knowledge about our history, the actual narratives we relate often differ radically from one another, so much so that they sometimes seem to leave us in different fields altogether. The divergence is especially acute, I believe, in how we account for the twentieth-century rise of composition-rhetoric as an academic field and, in particular, the historical status we grant—or refuse to grant—to the "process revolution" of the 1970s. (25-26)

He moves on to make this assertion: "...it's hard to deny that there has been, over the past half century, a rise in our professional status, growth in the academic resources available to us, and an increase in our intellectual depth, breadth, and rigor. The change in fortunes is remarkable and, in many ways, still quite recent" (27).

And then he asks this set of questions:

"What happened? Exactly when, how, and why did composition-rhetoric emerge as a discipline in the postwar North American academy? How did it get from 1945, when 'the field' was essentially a single course--textbook driven, disparaged by its own professors, subordinate to the content areas, and unattached to a scholarly enterprise--to the 1980s and 1990s when hundreds of new comp-rhet Ph.D.s every year had their pick of tenure-track academic jobs in North American college and universities" (27)?

And this seems to be his main question and the answer is, there are two stories we tell to answer this question.

Story 1: In one story, the key event in the field's emergence occurred "around 1963," when composition teachers finally adopted a theoretical rather than a pedagogical attitude towards written discourse… In English Departments, the turn re-awakened compositionists to their ancient roots in rhetoric, providing them with a powerful and attractive alternative to "current-traditionalism" and, more importantly, a compelling intellectual vision capable of transcending the freshman course, generating research projects of wide scope and manifest value, and motivating full academic careers that were as rich and rewarding as those in any other field. (28)

Story 2: In the other story,the rhetoric revival of the late 1950s and early1960s may have been noteworthy, but it didn't create a discipline. It failed to supplant the old pedagogical paradigm, and it wasn't flexible enough conceptually to sponsor an autonomous research field and motivate careers dedicated to composition-rhetoric itself. For that, the profession would have to wait until "around 1971," when the "process revolution" provided teachers with a new focus on individual students and their actual composing processes, and new kinds of writing classrooms prom ised personal growth, intellectual discovery, and social change. The pro cess revolution also supplied the young profession with a new, seemingly limitless research agenda, focused on writing as both noun and verb, for both adult and developmental contexts, and an exciting new public identity, centered on literacy as individual and social goal. (27-28)

Claim: I will myself argue below for connecting the rhetoric revival and the process revolution more deeply than we usually do. But given how the two stories have actually been used over the last generation, I can't help but read them as conflicting explanations of how we came to be as a discipline in the late twentieth century. (29)

More on Story 2: 

While composition-rhetoric was profoundly changed during the postwar years by the GI Bill, the General Education movement, the founding of CCCC, and the professional growth of the 1950s and 1960s, it was the1970s when the field really came into its own intellectually, epistemologically, and pedagogically—at least according to our single most widely shared disciplinary narrative. That emergence, we tell ourselves, was the result of a dramatic turn, in both our teaching and our research, away from written products and towards writing processes. (29-30)

[Hairston] argued that the shift began in the mid-1950s with Chomsky's Syntactic Structures and picked up steam in the 1960s with the work of Francis Christensen and the 1966 Dartmouth Conference. But the immediate cause for the change, Hairston argued, was a crisis in the old product-oriented paradigm of composition pedagogy, a crisis that was felt most acutely in U.S. higher education only after 1970, with the advent of "open admissions policies, the return to school of veterans and other groups of older students who are less docile and rule- bound than traditional freshmen, the national decline in conventional verbal skills, and the ever larger number of high school graduates going on to college as our society demands more and more credentials for economic citizenship" (82). Throw into that mix the untrained teachers who were still teaching compositions at most institutions, in programs still administered by untrained faculty members, and you had the makings of a genuine educational crisis. The flashpoint for all this, wrote Hairston, was the institution of open enrollment at City College in New York City in 1970 and the impetus this provided scholar-teacher Mina Shaughnessy to publicly register for the field the "shock" of the new non-traditional students and their writing (83). Instead of despairing or merely repeating the old pieties, Shaughnessy looked athow those students actually wrote, with all the "errors" this entailed, and attempted thereby to understand the logic involved in that activity. Other researchers, such as Janet Emig, James Britton, Linda Flower, and John R. Hayes, also began to shine a newly descriptive light onto students' actual writing processes, according to Hairston. (30)