Notes from conversation w/Kate (1/22/14)

The draft of "like spinach and..." that I have drafted has essentially three sections:

1. Campus context, post-war
2. Story of the abolition and re-instatement of Freshman English, 1939-1946.
3. Lit review of comp during the post-war years

The first stays, the second needs to be cut almost entirely, the third needs to be condensed a good deal so I can get to the data on UNH itself sooner.

This is not just a story about Freshman English, it's a story about the stages by which UNH became a key site of innovation for writing pedagogy and research.

The composites I have drawn are a GREAT way to start the book, but they also need to be contextualized--by talking about what was AROUND Freshman English at each of these two periods--not just about Freshman English...in other words, describe a bit more of the institutional culture of writing around the course at these two historical moments. Spend more time with this...this section frames the whole project: "a tale of two courses."

The emergence of composition at a local site---authoring a discipline examines the ways in which rhetoric and composition "emerged" during the post-World War II years drawing on the source of evidence of journals. What if we were to do something similar using a case study approach and local archives: the emergence of composition and rhetoric during the post-war years: an institutional history.

Purpose: To examine the emergence of a discipline at a local site (as opposed to via the field's journals, a la Goggin).

This book traces the post-World War II emergence of rhetoric and composition as a discipline within departments of English in U.S. institutions of higher education through the lens of one site of composition teaching and research, the University of New Hampshire.

Another quote that might help me frame my project comes from Fleming's "RHETORIC REVIVAL OR PROCESS REVOLUTION? Revisiting the Emergence of Composition-Rhetoric as a Discipline":

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 PhDs every year had their pick of tenure-track academic jobs in North American collegesand universities? (27)

The story I am telling about UNH is one way of answering that question.