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February 06, 2005
The Resistant Writer
Payne, Charles. The Resistant Writer: Rhetoric as Immunity, 1850 to the Present. New York: State University of New York Press, 1999.
author's purpose/goal: to construct a history of comp as a discipline that is more microscopic in its approach; critical of previous comp histories, particularly Berlin's, and their attempts to chronicle comp's history by making broad generalizations about social factors and their influences on the direction of writing instruction; this work is in response to "historians who were surveying the field of composition more broadly" (23).
methodology: archival work
methods: focuses on the works and writings of Edward Tyrrel Channing and Adams Sherman Hill, 3rh and 5th Boylston Professors at Harvard (1819-51 and 1876-1904 respectively); both have been portrayed as villians who worked toward policing public discourse; in other words, Channing and Hill sought to maintain the exclusionary practices that ensure that would "enable students to resist the enfeebling and overwhelming onsluaghts of a culture" (xii)
Posted by emnorris at February 6, 2005 09:54 AM
Comments
Elisa actually posted this entry on 1/25 but didn't set the draft status to "Publish." That's why (in case anyone's wondering) it's only just now that it's appearing on the blog.
Posted by: senioritis at February 6, 2005 11:03 AM