Sent: Tuesday, August 25, 2009 1:30 PM
To: WPA-L@ASU.EDU
Subject: Rhet/comp book for English graduate survey class
Fascinating discussions on the list these last few days about non-rhet/comp
professors' views of what rhet/comp is and should be, which brings up a
question about how to best represent our field to our own non-rhet/comp grad
students.
My question: what ONE book would you have new English-department
graduate students read in order to get a sense of the field of rhet/comp.
Background: All of our incoming graduate students (literature,
rhet/comp, creative writing) take an introductory course that surveys the
field of English studies. Although we have a strong rhet/comp group here,
the course has always been taught by a person specializing in literature.
For some time, the course has been using Robert Scholes's _Rise and Fall of
English_ to represent rhet/comp, which is okay in the sense that Scholes has
a solid reputation among literature specialists (so they pay attention to
him). It's not so good in the sense that we're sending the message that it
takes a lit person to stick up for our field intelligently, plus the book's
now over a decade old (which sends a different unfortunate message).
So, while I realize that every program is different and needs to
choose such texts accordingly, I'd appreciate your advice and ideas.
Chuck Paine
University of New Mexico
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Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:50:17 -0400
From: "Hillard, Van"
Subject: Re: Rhet/comp book for English graduate survey class
Chuck,
Acknowledging the impossiblity of the one book requirement of your question, I vote for Sharon Crowley's COMPOSITION IN THE UNIVERSITY: HISTORICAL AND POLEMICAL ESSAYS. Pittsburgh, 1998. It offers a cogent political and intellectual critique of the place of writing instruction in the American academy that takes up where Scholes leaves off, and squarely reckons with the disappearance of rhetoric instruction as an institutional-historical contingency. (But, you probably knew that already).
Van
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If you're looking for a fairly recent monograph, I'm rather fond of Andrea
Lunsford's *Writing Matters: Rhetoric in Private and Public
Lives
*. If you wanted to supplement it just a bit, you could also have the
students read either her 1992 essay "Rhetoric and Composition" that was
published in the *Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and
Literatures* or her 1991 essay "The Nature of Composition Studies" in *An
Introduction to Composition Studies*. I did just this in an upper division
composition studies course last fall and the students found Lundsford's
rewriting/rethinking of what composition studies is to be be fascinating.
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Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:46:21 -0400
From: Nick Carbone
Subject: Re: Rhet/comp book for English graduate survey class
I found, when I was starting out, Tate and Corbett's _The Writing
Teacher's Sourcebook_ to be helpful to me. It was as much practical,
which I needed, as well as an introduction to the field's issues
overall. I used the second edition back then.
The most recent edition is the 4th, but it last pubbed in 1999, so it
might be missing a bit of important stuff, but it's still a good book
to look at http://tinyurl.com/l36fwu.
Given the last pub date of the Sourcebook, I'd also look to TR
Johnson's _Teaching Composition, Background Readings_ at
http://tinyurl.com/nnfdfz (It's a B/SM professional book w/ a new
edition in 2008.).
See also Erika Lindeman's _A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers_, which
I've also used and liked.
None of these book attempts to be comprehensive, but they all speak to
new to the field teachers as teachers first, but without ignoring the
scholarship that informs pedagogy.
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Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:09:14 -0400
From: "Jack N. Morales"
Subject: Re: Rhet/comp book for English graduate survey class
Chuck,
Two titles come to mind:
1. Cross Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. It's edited by Victor
Villanueva and it an anthology of the major articles and debates
within the field on modern composition studies. All (and by all I mean
most) of the "heavyweights" are in here. I think grad students tend to
get this assigned...though I really don't know. It looks like
something that grad students would have.
2. For a straight history of the field, I think Joe Harris' A Teaching
Sunject: Composition since 1966 would be great to have folks read.
There are some other books that come to mind and I don't want to get
crazy here, I'm sure all these suggestions are great, but Pat Bizzell
and Bruce Herzberg's The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical
Times to the Present might be a good anthology of primary source
material on the history and development of rhetorical theory. Or you
could just have them read everything Jim Berlin ever published and go
from there :-)
Hope some of this helps
Jack
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Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:28:26 -0700
From: Irene L Clark
Subject: Re: Rhet/comp book for English graduate survey class
We use my book, _Concepts in Composition _ published by Taylor and Francis.
Irene
Irene L. Clark Ph.D.
Director of Composition
Professor of English
California State University, Northridge
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Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:13:28 -0700
From: Gregory R Glau
Subject: Re: Rhet/comp book for English graduate survey class
For two years now we've used T. R. Johnson's TEACHING COMPOSITION: BACKGROUND READINGS (3rd ed., Bedford/St. Martin's). It's not as comprehensive as the Norton text but includes some readings I wanted our new GTAs to have that the Norton doesn't include; we also supplement with readings from jstor.
My bigger issue isn't so much selecting readings but we have only a one-semester TA Practicum and it's difficult to even barely touch on our field in just that short of a time period.
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Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:08:12 -0400
From: Paula Mathieu
Subject: Re: Rhet/comp book for English graduate survey class
It's not an overview or 'greatest hits' of composition studies, but I
had my most recent graduate class read Relations, Locations,
Positions: Composition Theory for Writing Teachers, edited by Peter
Vandenberg, Sum Hum and Jennifer Clary-Lemon (NCTE 2006). The class
really enjoyed the readings and were able to engage the theory and
connect it to their own experiences as writers and as developing
teachers. I found it to be a rich text, and more interesting to the
students than a historical overview.
pjm
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