Lunch at the Night Hawk: Or Kinneavy Moves His Office (Newkirk)

Nevertheless, my thesis finally is this: that key to the disciplinary formation of composition in the mid and late 1970s was a rejection of certain principles that seemed to undergird literary study as it was practiced then. (65)

This collective estrangement from literary study played a key role in the early formation of composition studies as a discipline. In fact, it is impossible to understand the disciplinary roots of composition without reference to the dominant culture of English departments as we perceived it. It is not too much of an exaggeration to claim that composition studies inverted the values of literary studies; that it defined itself in opposition to the prevailing set of values we saw in operation. (65)

But maybe even more importantly, it established "access" as a central preoccupation of composition studies. If literary scholars were being acculturated to see real fulfillment in the teaching of skilled and advanced students, where they might work within their scholarly specialties, Shaughnessy was encouraging us, teaching us, to "dive in" to the messy democratic work of helping the underprepared. (66)

Still I would argue that by inverting the perceived disciplinary biases of literary studies, composition studies has responsibly established itself as a field committed to access, as a field intellectually interested in the difficulties and promise of marginalized students. (67)