Crowley: Notes on Post-War Composition (1945-1960/1970)

Crowley

Chapter 5: Literature and Composition: Not Separate But Certainly Unequal

Current-Traditional Rhetoric and Humanism (94)

Literature as Antidote (103)

Lit-Comp in the Sixties (111)

A Formal Partnership (115)

In sum: during the first three decade of the century, literary study was a fixture in the required composition course. Even though it was universally required, composition belonged to the English department, and English teachers everywhere conceived in the course as an introduction to the culture practice of English and the study of its literature. English teachers seemed unable to comprehend that writing instruction might involve anything other than literary study, on the one hand, and drill and in grammar, usage, and formal fluency, on the other. They understood required composition instruction to be an exercise in the improvement of character and good taste, which were enhanced, Not by practice in composing messages that might actually do work in the world, But by reading good books. In the absence of a viable rhetoric or series of composition, these teachers simply could not imagine composition as an independent discursive or pedagogical practice. (103)

Vacancy for the use of literature and required composition instruction was not a strong theme in professional literature published during the 1930s and 1940s. During the 30s, instruction in the required course settled into a comfortable pattern that combined current-traditional formalism with more or less literary study, depending upon the history and mission of a given college or university and the intellectual bent the faculty who designed the course. During the 1940s and 50s, however, traditional ways of teaching freshman English were seriously challenged by the absent of interest and communication skills. Because of the success of this challenge, English teachers defense of the use of literary texts in the required first-year course resurfaced during the 1950s. (103)

In the 1950s and 1960s, introductory composition was still being taught according to the dictates of the current traditional theory of discourse inherited from the people who have given the course it’s original shape in the late 19^th century. (103)

Alert composition textbooks suggest that literature was still being used in composition instruction I widescale during the 1960s and 1970s. (111)

A new and rather bizarre rationale for the use of literature and first-year composition developed between 1940 and 1960: literary texts begin to be read as models of current-traditional principles of discourse. (114)

Chapter 6: Terms of Employment: Rhetoric Slaves and Lesser Men

Composition was not always staff the way it is now until 1940 or so, composition classes were taught by full-time teachers, although they generally were the newest members of the permanent faculty. This changed when disciplinary specialization begin to affect staffing in the undergraduate curriculum. With the narrowing of faculty interests the company adoption of the research ideal, It became increasingly difficult to find a full-time faculty were willing to teach general or introductory courses, and by 1950, American universities with graduate programs have begun to rely on graduate students to staff the required first-year composition course. It also begun the practice of hiring part-time help to meet staffing demands imposed by the postwar explosion in college enrollments. (119)

In 1971, Ray Kytle recounted his history as a teacher of composition. At the large University where he did his graduate work, he noted, “composition was taught almost exclusively by ‘slaves,’” that is, by graduate students (339). At another university, where he was then employed, Kytle noted that “composition is taught primarily by serfs—untenured and, by present criteria, untenurable instructors.  These people, most of whom would prefer to be teaching literature, can expect to remain on the faculty for no more than 3 to 5 years.” By the 1970s, English department had begun the practice of admitting more people to doctoral-level graduate study  then could possibly find employment as full-time teachers of literature. While this practice provided plenty of students for graduate seminars and literature, it had the unhappy effect, Kytle thought, of lowering the status of composition instruction. (130)

Chapter 8: Freshman English and War

Universal requirements prosper in wartime… certainly the advent of World War II firmly cemented in place the universal requirement in introductory composition, even though it brought about enormous changes in the curricula of freshman English itself. (155)

The communication skills episode affected history freshman English and a number of important ways for one thing, the development of this new approach to the basic course instigated the establishment of a professional association for teachers: the conference on College composition and communication. The definition of writing as communication rather than expression moves teachers to consider rhetoric as a possible theoretical resource for composition instruction to the first time since the course was invented. The advent of communication skills upon the scene of freshman English also marks the first time that English departments ownership of the basic course was challenged by authorities at different clouds to diaper it from it humanist moorings in literature and current- traditional pedagogy. (156)

But general education was also motivated by quite different concerns that were foregrounded by the advent of the second world war. Once America entered the war, educators lost no time in arguing the point of education was the preservation of democracy, and those who town general education advertised it as the means by which the education of citizens in a democracy should be pursued. In other words, the war and its attendant rhetoric fomented desire for a return to the older, more centralized and unified approach to higher education that had formerly been  designated “liberal.” (162)

Perhaps the most important of these potentials was the emphasis on communication rather than expression. To make communication central to a pedagogy suddenly makes audiences, messages, and situations important. In such a milieu humanist focus on self improvement fades from view, and teachers attention is wrenched away from text outword, towards the world and it’s problems. (171)

In this passage Malmstrom  names all the innovations brought to the required first year course by persons who were truly informed and interested in communication skills: it’s emphasis on the social, It’s insistence that the point of language use his communication rather than expression; it’s melding of the practical with a patriotic ideal; it’s trust of students’ willingness and ability to learn on their own. (177)

The goal of freshman English was to create humanist subjectivities. Its pedagogy centered on the examination of humanist texts. Its instructional tools—literature, current-traditional discourse theory, and traditional grammar—we’re treated as a exemplars or standards to which students were expected to measure up. Communication skills, I’ll be other hand, we’re grounded in theories of discourse borrowed from the social sciences their indebtedness to social science was apparent in their use of impure cool testing, in their emphasis on the social uses of language, and their interest in public rather than private uses of discourse. Such courses supposedly fitted instruction to students’ ability rather than the other way around. (181)

Furthermore, the emphasis on communication open the course outward toward the world rather than in word for the students’ expression of their experiences and insights. (181)

Most communication skills programs have been phased out by 1960, although some of the apparatus they initiated, such as placement testing, remains as part of current composition programs… But resistance to communication skills on the part of traditional English teachers cannot be discounted as a factor in its demise. (183)

Most seriously, from the point of view of the study, general education offer the university a new rationale to support the universal requirement in introductory composition. (186)

Connors

Composition rhetoric is neither a stagnant survival nor any of a hundred proposed revolutions.  It exists, as it always has, as an ever shifting balance between the old and comforting and the new and exciting, the ways of lore and the ways of theory, the push of societal pressure and the inertia of academic traditions. (17)

Introduction

Postwar Composition-Rhetoric (1865-1885)

Consolidation Composition-Rhetoric (1885-1910)

Modern Composition-Rhetoric (1910-1960)

Most issues in composition methodology were decided, one way or another, by 1910, and after 1910 we emerge into what I call the Modern period of composition-rhetoric, a period of relative stasis that is usually associated with the pejorative uses of the term “current traditional rhetoric.” The Modern period of composition-rhetoric is defined by the almost absolute reign of a freshman composition requirement and the habits and industries that grow up around such a dominant institution. During this time, freshman composition programs take on their current forms, under the general direction of but somewhat autonomous from English departments. The huge courses are taught multiple sections by “section hands” who are either graduate assistants or instructors, many of whom are frustrated literary specialists who teach writing only because compelled. During the Modern period, it becomes a truism that student dislike for Freshman Composition is exceeded only by the dislike of its teachers. (13)

On the level of form and methods, composition rhetoric was forced bicultural pressures to insist more and more strongly on formal and mechanical correctness after 1900, and this formal obsession became the hallmark of the course. (13)

As young put it describing his “current-traditional paradigm,” this was a rhetoric consisting of

Emphasis on the composed product rather than the composing process; the analysis of discourse into words, sentences, and paragraphs; the classification of discourse into description, narration, exposition, an argument; the strong concern with usage (syntax, spelling, punctuation) and with style (Economy, clarity, emphasis); the preoccupation with the informal essay and the research paper, and so on. (“Paradigms and Problems,” 31)

In addition, Gary Tate has identified as other key elements in this form of rhetoric “A focus on expository writing, they believe that reality is located in the external world, A denial of the personal voice of the student writer, A simpleminded prescriptiveness, an emphasis on reason to the exclusion of the other human faculties, A devotion to a simple, linear view of the composing process, and a belief that the primary job of a writer is to transfer to the page ideas that exist already in the mind” (“Current-Traditional Rhetoric,” 1).

Berlin and Hobbs

Berlin's Key Actors in the 20th century drama of "conflicting positions on the most effective method for teaching writing" (264):

Summary: During the between-wars period "the insistence of liberal culturalists on genius as the essential element of writing at its best was now given a democratic application. Each and every individual was seen to possess creative potential, a potential the proper classroom environment could unlock and promote" (260)

1. sponsors of socially-based rhetorics (Dewey & Scott): an "insistence that writing is a social act performed through a complex interaction of writer, audience, subject, and language" (263) & "Those in the camp of social rhetoric, on the other hand, lay the blame for these disorders at the feet of the social and political arrangements generated by capitalism" (263).
2. sponsors of expressive writing (Hugh Mearns, Harold Rugg, John T. Frederick, Theodore Baird): "writing from this perspective enables students to get in touch with the private and the personal, the source of all that is meaningful" (261) & "those supporting the value of expressive writing looked to private and personal resolutions to the economic and social catastrophes of the day" (263). Dominant during the between-wars period, according to Berlin.
3. Social efficiency movement (G.K. Hall): "This movement argued for considering a student's stage of psychological development in planning instruction. Schools were also to become attentive to the needs of the workplace...Finally, school and work were regarded as places of equal opportunity where the best, the brightest, and the hardest working were to be rewarded in accordance with the strictest meritocratic principles" (256-57)
4. Liberal culturalists: "genius as the essential element of writing at its best" (260)
5. Life Adjustment: "personal and social adjustment became the great concern of post war education" (264), the "dominant influence in secondary school writing instruction" (265)
6. Communications Course: "a combination of writing, reading, speaking, and listening activities" (265) & "strongly influenced by the General Education movement during the 1930s and by the General Semantics school of linguistics" (265)

My Periods:

• 1945-1960 (p. 264-269)
• 1960-1975 (p. 269-275)
• 1975-1985 (p. 275-282)

As Lester Faigley has pointed out, an enormous expansion due to Baby Boomers came about just as composition studies was aspiring to disciplinary status: from 2.7 million in 1949-50, to 3.6 million in 1959-60, to more than 8 million in 1969-70 (250)

YALE!!! And liberal culture...

Of course, current-traditional rhetorics did not go unchallenged in the new college and university. Their most important opponent was situated at Yale and other established prestigious Atlantic seaboard colleges. These schools came to stand for an ideal of English studies which has been labeled "liberal culture." It was Yale, after all, which in 1892 opposed Harvard's use of literature to teach composition, arguing that literature ought to be studied for its own sake. The proponenets of liberal culture argued that the literary text was the expression of the highest potential of human nature, representing the perfect fusion of truth, goodness, and beauty. From this perspecdtive, the claims of current-traditional rhetoric were altogether too democratic, arguing mistakenly that writing, like enginnering or farming or pharmacy, could be taught.

(this passage continues for another page or so and is useful in thinking through the backgrounds of Bingham and Towle, in particular)

See Palmer, Glenn. "Culture and Efficiency Through Composition." English Journal 1.8 (1912): 488- ?.
(A summary of the disagreement between Harvard and Yale was found in this essay...)

1945-1960

For expressionistic rhetoric, writing--all writing--is accordingly art. This means that it can be learned, and learned by all, but not taught. The work of the teacher is to provide an environment in which students can learn what cannot be directly imparted in instruction. The expression of the writer is the product of a private and personal vision that cannot be expressed in normal, everyday parlance. This language, after all, refers to the public world of sense data and social experience. The writer must instead learn to use metaphor to express meaning that is separate and above this limited realm. Sensory experience, on the other hand, is also very important since it provides experiences that can be used as materials for metaphor. Writing from this perspective enables students to get in touch with the private and the personal, the source of all that is meaningful. It therefore empowers the student to shape a newly uncovered and better self--that is, half creating and half discovering the source of all truth and value. Furthermore, this product of the authentic writing experience--the truly personal--is organic, representing the perfect fusion of form and content. Finally, this method of teaching writing is concerned with power and politics, sometimes by implication and at other times openly in its critique of the dehumanizing effects of industrial capitalism. Its response is to enable each individual to realize his or her true self in order to bring about a better society. In other words, the private and personal is always prior to the public and social, the latter being an effect of the former. (261)

...the communications course was varied in the form it assumed in colleges during the late 1940s and the 1950s, even including attempts to introduce life adjustment into the college. Most of these courses, however, were conservative, offering a current-traditional approach that presented communications in the service of the democratic ideals recently challenged from abroad. (265)

The distinguishing feature of the 1950s in considering the relation of literature to composition is that, for the first time since the Uniform Lists, college professors were in large numbers insisting that the best way to teach composition is through reading literature and writing about it. This was, in large part, a result of the sense of professional identity achieved by teachers of literature following the war... As indicated earlier, the arguments offered in defense of this view came directly from the tradition of liberal culture, still alive in literary studies. Students, it was charged, had nothing to say and literature provided them with rich subject matter. Writing about themselves required "a flair amounting to genius," and most were certainly "not geniuses." Reading literary texts and writing about them provided the knowledge and stimulation that the student needed to become liberally educated and enabled the teacher (almost certainly at this time a male) to keep his career alive and vital.  (266-67)

...the liberal culturalist notion of the uses of literature in the writing class is offered in the name of democracy. College is to prepare the leaders of a democratic society, and literature is the best means for doing so. (267)

Writing about literature was also offered in the interests of the college teachers themselves: after all, it was literature that they knew best and, if they were to be forced to teach writing, they ought certainly to do so by focusing on their own area of expertise. That this might mean serving the professional interests o the teachers more than the instructional needs of the students was not considered. (267)

The New Rhetoric and its proponents--including such as Janice Lauer, Richard Young, Frank D'Angelo, Richard Larsen, James Kinneavy and George Yoos--would in the next decade work to establish rhetoric and composition as a discipline. Their vision of composition teaching would continue to impact theorists and practitioners through the end of the century, with the majority of graduate programs offering coursework in historical rhetoric. (269)


Steward, Randall. "The Freshman Course Needs a Current of Ideas." College English 17 (1955): 16-19.