Connors Quotes

Composition history, like rhetorical history, is only one channel of the knowledge we in composition studies must seek. Yet without it, we are cut off from information of vast usefulness. We are not here alone; others have come before us, and from their situations, their struggles, victories and defeats we can build the context that will give our work as teachers and theorists background, substance, and originality. Only by understanding where we came from can we ascertain where we want to go. ("Writing the History of our Discipline," 1991, p. 70)

As Robert Connors writes, the historian's project in rhetoric and composition is "the telling of stories about the tribe that make the tribe real [...W]e are telling the stories of our fathers and mothers, we are legitimating ourselves through legitimating them" ("Dreams and Play: Historical Method and Methodology," p. 234 in Selected Essays of Robert J. Connors).