Remapping Revisionist Historiography (Gold)

Now that our recovery projects have gone forth—and multiplied—we face a new set of challenges. While the work of scholars such as James A. Berlin (Rhetoric and Reality; Writing Instruction), Sharon Crowley (Composition in the University; Methodical Memory), and Robert J. Connors has called attention to the role of ideology in pedagogy, provided a useful taxonomic framework for describing pedagogical practice, and offered us historical master narratives to respond to and resist, contemporary research needs demand that we do more than speak back to this earlier scholarship. (16-17)

This essay

• analyzes the current state of revisionist scholarship, 
• identifies key research challenges and posits ways to respond to them, 
• and suggests recent exemplars for future practice. 

In this newly emerging revisionist landscape, rhetoric and composition historiography faces two primary challenges: integration and fragmentation. How do we map new scholarship onto existing scholarship, and how do we do so in a way that allows us to draw from a shared body of knowledge? (17)

I argue that rhetoric and composition historiography must not simply recover neglected writers, teachers, locations, and institutions, but must also demonstrate connections between these subjects and larger scholarly conversations. Further, we must better incorporate recent advances in recovery work, thus beginning with the assumption of a complex, multivocal past as our starting point for historical inquiry. Finally, we must recognize a more fluid interaction between ideology and pedagogy, resisting the temptation to reinscribe easy binaries, taxonomies, and master narratives, even when countering them. (17)

Our “dominant” narratives, I would suggest, are dominant no more. We can no longer assume that little or nothing has been written since Berlin, Crowley, and Connors; that Berlin’s taxonomies accurately map the field; that current-traditional rhetoric and the Harvard model have been historically and universally dominant and that both are synonymous; that current-traditional rhetoric, a “theory” without theoreticians, can be easily classified, identified, and dismissed; that epistemologies entail ideologies and pedagogies that in turn directly enact these ideologies; or that a social constructivist stance on knowledge making is adequate to address our pedagogical challenges.