Schedule of assigned readings

We will begin the semester with economic issues that have become established in composition publications: the unequal distribution of capital to those who teach composition; and the debate over the culpability of the writing program administrator or the requirement of first-year composition in that distribution. Donna Strickland, Eileen Schell, Marc Bousquet, and Sharon Crowley offer glimpses of the conversation.

Then we turn to U.S. copyright law, which compositionists are finding they must scrutinize, because it is the material artifact of what is assumed to be the economic basis of all worthwhile writing:

Paul Butler offers an explanation of copyright law;
and Lawrence Lessig, a critique of it.
Two of Andrea Lunsford's articles raise copyright conundra for composition studies.
A small film makes big claims: Alternative Freedom. Dir. Twila and Shaun. Project Free Zarathustra, 2006.
John Logie demonstrates one rhetorician's resistance to contemporary extensions of copyright.

To develop theoretical frames for material analyses of writing and writing instruction, we will read Bourdieu's "Forms of Capital," followed by Horner's Terms of Work in Composition, and then by Bourdieu's State Nobility, which describes the ways in which educational systems in France are designed to preserve existing social hierarchies.

Using these frames (and others that we may develop together), we will turn our attention to analyses of institutionalized economies of writing and writing instruction:

Neal Lerner and Murphy & Law analyze outsourced writing instruction. What happens when the instruction in the writing program or the writing center is no longer considered cost efficient?
Reading Bill Marsh's economic analysis of plagiarism discourses, we will inquire into the extent to which plagiarism-checking machines might be considered material naturalizations of an economy of writing. How might that economy be described in its relation to composition? And how do Sue Saltmarsh's and Kelly Ritter's arguments complicate these questions?
Contributors to Ericsson & Haswell's collection explore the mechanization of writing instruction. If we take machines as a material naturalization of an economic system, we can read selections from this book for their portraits of economies of writing instruction.

As a conclusion to the course, we will ask how J.K. Gibson-Graham's postcapitalist agenda might be implemented within composition studies, to take us beyond analysis and toward curricular activism.

A full list of the texts named here is available online. I will order the books through the university bookstores and give you a CD with the articles and essays on it. We will watch Alternative Freedom together in class.