In the frosh composition course I’m teaching this summer, I’ve been letting my students get to know the history of composition. We’ve been talking about literacy practices and education, particularly how certain discourses are privileged over others; of course, because composition is the “gatekeeping” profession, I wanted to make my students aware of the historicity of beliefs and practices in the composition classroom.
The timeline:
*Pre-Gutenberg Printing Press
*Immediately After Gutenberg Press
*The birth of the composition class
*Static Abstractions
*Berlin’s article on rhetoric and ideology in the composition classroom
I breezed through the early days of education into the early 19th century. But I spent a little bit of time discussing (in general) different strains of thought in composition—in particular time eras—and how that created certain (familiar-to-them) practices. They found this part of my lecture quite interesting (and amusing—particularly when I talked about 1980s ideas about computers and writing).
But I wasn’t prepared for one question at the end of my explanation of Berlin’s rhetorics:
“What’s next?”
The question was genuine and asked quite eagerly. I was somewhat dumbfounded. Of course, there is always what is next. But what will that next rhetoric be that shapes composition? We are very much still in the social-epistemic. That isn’t to say that we’ve left previous rhetorics behind. But what is beyond the social-epistemic? I had to admit that I didn’t know: perhaps I hadn’t read the right book just yet.
Perhaps that’s what excites me so much about working in comp/rhet: I don’t know the answers and I don’t know what’s coming next. But just to know that the rules are always arbitrary is exhilarating.
Did I mention that my students are quite amazing this semester?
