History Bump

Yes, I'm commenting on my own post until I figure out a better way to communicate in blogdom. My other thought is the idea of doing these interviews, this collection of stories (insired of course by Roen, Brown and Enos) at OCC. After all, we have a pretty good contact with Nance...

Commenting on your own post is fine! Or you can go back into your original post and revise it. Some bloggers consider that a sacrilege; others do it freely; and still others mark their revisions when then make them. I'm personally in that latter category; see, for example, this entry. Pick whichever method you like best.

Personal narratives have been published in comp/rhet recently and have been fairly well received. The one that leaps to mind is Roen, Duane H., Stuart C. Brown, and Theresa Enos, eds. Living Rhetoric and Composition: Stories of the Discipline. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999. But how would you collect the stories of SU faculty? Through interviews? That would be legitimate scholarship, definitely—and probably very interesting. I doubt, however, that you could persuade them to write their stories for you. Including faculty from OCC would be fascinating. Interviews w/ students: yes, very interesting, very useful; but how would it contribute to composition history?
Separation between teacher & dirty student body: nobody's done that as an historical project that I know of, and it, too, would be legitimate and interesting. Two good secondary sources:
Atherton, Catherine. "Children, Animals, Slaves and Grammar." Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning. Ed. Yun Lee Too and Niall Livingstone. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. 214-244.
Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.
The "roots of composition history" project would have to be grounded in your own good background in U.S. social history. If you don't already have that, I don't recommend tackling that one.

Thanks for the feedback. If I tried to collect a history of CCR at SU or the writing program at OCC, I think its effectiveness would depend alot on the interview questions, i.e. what brought these instructors to the place that they are and what do they see of the future in comp/rhet studies? The idea of interviewing recent grads would be to see show their vision of comp/rhet is or isn't being played out. Interviewing current grads would be mostly about trying to obtain their vision of current instruction and professional goals... This would be less historical, but I think would provide a nice "time capsule" image of the field in a certain place and time.

Teachers and dirty student bodies would be mostly secondary source work, trying to put together a history that maybe hasn't been written yet. After reading White, though, I'm hesitant to try and put together a history full of my own biases... Unless, of course, I do some kind of disclaimer, like Connors. Just read the most fascinating text called HITCHCOCK'S FILMS REVISED by Robin Wood. Wood basicaly combines his first book with a second book and an explanatory preface and new introduction that said that he doesn't believe in retracting his previous thoughts but letting them stand as representative of his personal and political views at the time. Between the first and second book on Hitchcock, he came out of the closet. Thus his new work is representative of a new personal and political framework. This, of course, is a work in film criticism more appropriate to the English dept., but I was struck with the truths that Wood speaks to us all.

I'll check out the recommended sources for teacher/student body work and make a decision about which path to follow.

Thanks,
Vanessa