History Bump

In light of White's framework for emplotments, I can think of ways to case Campbell's edited collection with each of the four master tropes.  The project is metaphorically emplotted, for example, in the sense that it (as a thing) stands for some other thing--the lost/faded/misunderstood contributions of women to composition's emergence, much like concerns Connors in his chapter on "Gender Influence."  The project, then, is framed as a metaphoric precedent; Campbell explicitly wants others to properly historicize a "feminist rhetoric."   

Read another way, the project could be called metonymically emplotted because Buck stands in place for others like her who, though they have yet to be properly historicized (as if that's even ever possible), stand as a large-scale manifestation of the field's emergence, larger-scale than Buck-as-individual, anyhow. In this sense, Buck is often cited as a "meta-name" for others like her.  Likewise, we might say that it is synechdochically emplotted because Buck's work as assembled represents a part of the whole of composition studies.  The collection, if we take it to be synechdochically emplotted, is a representative part of the field--an element of the whole (although whole-ness has issues, White would say), right? 

Finally, although I'm reluctant to suggest that the entire project could be understood as ironically emplotted, Campbell makes it very clear that Buck's forgotten-ness reflects particular disciplinary ironies related to both gender and labor.  Does this make it ironically emplotted?  I'm not sure, but some of the issues selected to reflect on composition's early professional practices might be understood as ironic. In the chapter on "Correspondence and Department Reports," for example, Campbell includes letters concerning class sizes, establishing, with the historical documents, Buck's claim that "Under such conditions [classes capped at 60] good teaching was so manifestly impossible that soon after taking charge of the department I was able to reduce the size of the freshman sections to a maximum of twenty-five" (264). The collection is filled with carefully selected ironic turns, many of which are embodied in Buck's original writing, making it difficult to determine whether Campbell sought to invoke them as part of her work.

As I worked through these ways of inferring emplotments, I questioned whether it was possible for a history to invoke all four of the master tropes.  After looking at the particular language analysis of Taylor undertaken by White in chapter four, I still have questions about whether we should conceive of large projects as emplotted in an over-arching or general way or whether, instead, we should find the master tropes prefiguring specific, sentential/phrasal (perhaps) encasements of history.