The Tangled Roots Of Literature, Speech Communication, Linguistics, Rhetoric/Composition, And Creative Writing: A Selected Bibliography On The History Of English Studies (Daly Goggin)

Daly Goggin, Maureen. "The Tangled Roots Of Literature, Speech Communication, Linguistics, Rhetoric/Composition, And Creative Writing: A Selected Bibliography On The History Of English Studies." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 29.4 (Autumn, 1999): 63-87.

 As Veysey's history of the rise of the modem university and as the histories of English studies and of the various disciplinary spin-offs demonstrate, no one of the three ideals ever existed in isolation in any one institution or in any one department or even necessarily in any one individual, though one over the others may have dominated. Rather these were invoked, configured and reconfigured in a variety of ways to help construct disciplinary, institutional and departmental identities. This tripartite construct of ends provides a useful lens for reading the histories of any disciplinary endeavor. Histories of literary studies, for example, make it clear that both research and liberal culture ideals were privileged while the utility ideal was disdainfully rejected. Early arguments to establish speech communication as a legitimate field centered on constructing an identity based on research and utility ideals. As Arthur Bochner and Eric Eisenberg point out, speech defined itself through a "combination of a utilitarian function and a scientific perspective" to break its bonds with English departments (and with a field increasingly turning to literature for its self-definition) (303-304). Linguistics from the beginning defined itself almost solely in terms of the research ideal. By contrast, both rhetoric and creative writing were marked as "art," that is, as praxis rather than as science, and thus, had the greatest difficulty in claiming legitimate space. Composition was further marginalized by being constructed early on as a space in which students were to demonstrate their ability to produce clear and correct prose. (65)