Journal 1 (12/31)

This project has been moving in directions I really didn't anticipate and feel, frankly, quite nervous about.

Originally, this was a project about the Donald Murray.

Then, this became a project about the development of writing and pedagogy at UNH during the time when Murray was there.

Now, this project has been in the process of becoming a project some things that are entirely different.

Over the past few weeks, I've been writing about a period when Murray wasn't even at UNH. I've gone back and looked at the UNH Bulletins from the period of 1911- well, through WWII. I never thought I would be doing this and its interesting to think about how this even got started. How did it get started? I kept going back and going back and I think it was because I was trying to understand the development of the curriculum, how it evolved. Okay, now I remember, I wanted to try to understand what came BEFORE the period when the curriculum was entirely literary in nature. When did that start? What preceded it?

And I discovered an interesting new story that I didn't really understand. My context expanded. I came to see, as I went back and learned about some of the earliest English faculty and the evolution of the curriculum, that there was an "egalitarian" period when all courses--drama, speech, composition, argument, literature, English education--counted towards the English major. This was interesting and unanticipated.

Then I began reading Sackett's history of UNH and I was reminded about the school's humble beginnings--there is a chapter in the book called "For Farmer's Sons" and this really instilled in me a sense of how the school, in its early days and at the turn of the century, really was a place for the pursuit of the agricultural and mechanic arts. I don't think I had a full enough sense of this.

Then I was reading Graff's book Professing Literature. This book was giving me a sense of how the profession of English emerged and evolved during the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th century. And I was beginning to see how the story of the development of English at UNH was so different from the larger story of the profession that Graff was telling.

This got me thinking about the idea of the land-grant college. This got me thinking about the question: who has told the story of the land grant college and the development of English studies? This got me thinking of another or perhaps wider audience for my work than just those who are interested in the development of composition during the post-war years. This got me thinking about whether the story of how English, as a discipline, evolved at the land-grants has been told and how the book I'm writing might, in part, tell this story (too).

And so, a new area of inquiry has emerged and I've allowed myself to run with it to see where it leads. On the one hand, this scares me because I've been at work on this project for so long that I fear that I'm just allowing myself to pursue new research directions instead of doing the probably harder work of actually sitting down and writing the book itself.

But at the same time, I am writing--have been writing--for a week or two now. The writing I've been doing has allowed me the opportunity to tell the story of the development of English at UNH during the early years. Is that a story that's interesting or important to this project and if so, why?

And what is the scope of this project? And why?

It seems to keep changing, the scope and/or the focus. And this is what I am finding both interesting and citing and simultaneously worrying. Because at some point you have to decide: what is this a book about (and why)? It can't be about everything.

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I see three different periods emerging that interest me. I'm thinking in terms of periods:

1903-1935 (Founding of Department until major first shifts to focus on literary study)

1935-1966 (The period when the literaryists/humanists/current-traditionalists assume control and power)--As Cain has discussed, in the 1940s New Criticism became "an established practice, and by the early 1950s it was 'the establishment' itself." (Miller, 179)

1966-1987 (The Rise of Writing at UNH)

I think another important thread I'm thinking about is the question of how English, as a discipline, remains relevant and how this project speaks to this larger question. Here, for example, is an interesting passage from Miller:

Shugrue proposed shifting the discipline's focus from literary to literacy studies in order to develop partnerships with schools, attract broader classes of students, and prepare graduates for varied careers.

During the late 1960s and 1970s it seems that this is exactly what was happening at UNH: 

re: develop partnerships with schools: Murray out into the schools, Fisher and Carnicelli working with two-year faculty in Maine
re: attract broader classes of students: new writing classes and the creation of ENGL 501, which turned into a second writing program (in addition to 401) and broadened the departments base
re: prepare graduates for varied careers: rise of creative writing and journalism and also education (and elementary education)

In sum, they built a "big tent."

Other reform proposals, such as those of John Gerber in 1977, also recognized that drops in majors and positions were due to broad changes in literacy and education that called upon professors to attend to the conditions and consequences of their work. Such pragmatic responses often treated the discipline's service mission as the key to revamping programs of study around the practical benefits it provided. Such proposals tried to harness the power of the uses of literacy to build public support, expand programs, and open up new career opportunities. To reformers, this response was simply common sense.

I've felt this before, but I am feeling it even moreso, now, that the primary label that has been attached to Murray has been expressionist--but that a more important label and the one that should come BEFORE expressionist is the label reformer. Might also apply this term to Carnicelli and Fisher.

To traditionalists, it threatened to overturn the profession by subordinating its higher purposes to its basic uses. Such anxieties were not ill founded. The instrumental powers of literacy have such popular appeal that they challenge the profession's sense of itself in ways that have been contained by confining writing and teacher training to service courses. In retrospect, we can see how such hierarchies have limited the disciplines learning capacities at critical phases in its development, for a discipline cannot expect to learn from the work it ignores. As changes in literacy deepened, the discipline could no longer maintain its critical distance, and practically engaged alternatives began to emerge in more broadly based departments. (203)

And so what I've been thinking about is how these two periods, the early period, responsive to the highly instrumental student population and institutional ethos, and the later period, responding to changes conditions on the ground and a dynamic reformer and his partners, presented an image of English that had broad appeal and spoke to the vocational or instrumental or service side of English...

Because one thing I've thought a lot about, just in terms of my own experience at RIC, is the way I am divorced or isolated, as a compositionist, from two key constituencies: creative writing and English education. In some ways, I wonder about how my experience speaks to larger conversations about disciplinarily, as the field becomes Writing Studies and becomes more of an enterprise unto itself, not as much engaged with the K-12 world and/or the creative writing world. It seems like these partnerships, along with journalism, were key to the big tent period of expansion and growth at UNH during the 1970s. K-12 folks, journalists, and writers all coming together and finding common cause and interest around writing and the teaching of writing--and no disciplinary identity of compositionist/rhetorician yet formed...perhaps until the arrival of Bob Connors in...? 1983/84? And then the creation of the doctoral program.

And what about Murray's efforts to refashion the English department--I think there is a proposal somewhere where Murray says that the literature side of the English department should focus on the TEACHING of literature, studying students' experience of reading literature. Newkirk also sometimes talks about this--how ironic it is that so much time is spent among the literary folks reading and interpreting the literature but no interest or very little in trying to understand the experiences of students as readers.

That's a lot for today. Enough.