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February 12, 2005
Troping the Discipline
For this project, I will perform a tropic analysis of College Composition and Communication to assess the metaphors that are employed by the contributors over historical time periods. I will use the methods described by Hayden White in The Tropics of Discourse to determine how the tropes of metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche constitute the ways in which people write about Composition Studies. The purpose of this project is to chart metaphoric trends in the development of Composition and to ascertain whether or not Composition scholarship has undergone a shift to a self-reflexive (ironic) trope. To begin this project, I will utilize the history of nine major English Studies journals Maureen Goggin traces in Authoring a Discipline. She states that “history reveals that the social and political conditions have been created for a discipline of rhetoric and composition,” and to demonstrate these conditions, Goggin analyzes historical periods that, while arbitrary, signify for her preparatory (1950-65), emerging (1965-80), and legitimizing (1980-1990) periods in the development of rhetoric and composition. My primary task will be to look at Goggin’s analysis of examples from these periods and see if the preparatory era employs metaphor, the emerging era employs metonymy, the legitimizing era employs synecdoche, and if there has been the development of a self-reflexive era from 1990 to the present. I will primarily be concerned with sketching the work that Goggin has accomplished and then analyzing the more recent period of scholarship in CCC to see what trends continue, how they continue, and whether the arrival of disciplinarity (believing that Goggin has made her case) coincides with the development of ironic discourse.
One of my reservations about this project is the apparent linear progression from metaphor to metonymy to synecdoche to irony, and I may find that an attempt to match White’s tropes to the chronology laid out by Goggin interferes with the tropes that the discourse of CCC is following. While I will attempt to select representative examples from CCC to sketch larger trends, I am nonetheless constrained by my editorial practices and the scope and thrust of this project. In an attempt to mitigate this as much as possible, I will review the examples used by Goggin and compare those to other selections from the same period so as not to unduly canonize a selection process that Goggin admits is somewhat arbitrary to begin with.
Preliminary Bibliography
Bishop, Wendy. "Against the Odds in Composition and Rhetoric." College Composition and Communication 53.2 (December 2001): 322-335.
Boquet, Elizabeth. "'Our Little Secret': A History of Writing Centers, Pre- to Post-Open Admissions." College Composition and Communication 50.3 (1999): 463-482.
Campbell, JoAnn. "Controlling Voices: The Legacy of English A at Radcliffe College 1883-1917." College Composition and Communication 43.4 (December 1992): 472-85.
Corbett, Edward P.J. "Teaching Composition: Where We've Been and Where We're Going." College Composition and Communication 38 (1987): 444-52.
Creek, Herbert L. "Forty Years of Composition Teaching." College Composition and Communication 6 (1955): 4-10.
George, Diana, and John Trimbur. "The 'Communication Battle,' or Whatever Happened to the 4th C?" College Composition and Communication 50.4 (June 1999): 682-698.
Gilyard, Keith. "African American Contributions to Composition Studies." College Composition and Communication 50.4 (June 1999): 626-644.
Goggin, Maureen Daly. Authoring a Discipline: Scholoary Journals and the Post-World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition. Malwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 2000.
Goggin, Maureen Daly. "Composing a Discipline: The Role of Scholarly Journals in the Disciplinary Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition Since 1950." Rhetoric Review 15.2 (Spring 1997): 322-349.
Goleman, Judith. "An 'Immensely Simplified Task': Form in Modern Composition-Rhetoric." College Composition and Communication 56.1 (Sept. 2004): 51-71.
Hackett, Herbert. "A Discipline of the Communication Skills." College Composition and Communication 6.1 (February 1955): 10-15.
Haswell, Richard H. "Grades, Time, and the Curse of Course." College Composition and Communication 51.2 (December 1999): 284-295.
Hawhee, Debra. "Composition History and the Harbrace College Handbook." College Composition and Communication 50.3 (February 1999): 504-523.
Heyda, John. "Fighting Over Freshman English: CCCC's Early Years and the Turf Wars of the 1950s." College Composition and Communication 50.4 (June 1999): 663-681.
Horner, Bruce, and John Trimbur. "English Only and U.S. College Composition." College Composition and Communication 53.4 (June 2002): 594-630.
Horner, Bruce. "Traditions and Professionalization: Reconceiving Work in Composition." College Composition and Communication 51.3 (February 2000): 366-398.
Kates, Susan. "Subversive Feminism: The Politics of Correctness in Mary Augusta Jordan's Correct Writing and Speaking (1904)." College Composition and Communication 48.4 (December 1997): 501-517.
Popken, Randall. "Edwin Hopkins and the Costly Labor of Composition Teaching." College Composition and Communication 55.4 (June 2004): 618-641.
Ritchie, Joy, and Kathleen Boardman. "Feminism in Composition: Inclusion, Metonymy, and Disruption." College Composition and Communication 50.4 (June 1999): 585-607.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones, and Jean C. Williams. "History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies." College Composition and Communication 50.4 (June 1999): 563-585.
Schultz, Lucille M. "Elaborating Our History: A Look at Mid-19th Century First Books of Composition." College Composition and Communication 45.1 (February 1994): 10-30.
Simmons, Sue Carter. "Constructing Writers: Barrett Wendell's Pedagogy at Harvard." College Composition and Communication 46.3 (October 1995): 327-52.
White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
Yancey, Kathleen Blake. "Looking Back as We Look Forward: Historicizing Writing Assessment." College Composition and Communication 50.3 (February 1999): 483-503.
Posted by trobryan at February 12, 2005 01:10 PM
Comments
Check.
Posted by: senioritis at February 13, 2005 05:08 AM
I take it this means "Good job. Now move on to phase 2, the Annotated Bibliography"?
I also realized as I was reading White's Chapter 5 (the one in which he analyzes Darwin) that the tropes may not be nearly as neat. White claims, if I'm reading it right, that the most effective histories actually mediate between two tropes AND reflect upon the language used by each trope, which pushes that particular historical account toward the ironic. As such, and from what I recall of Crowley's Composition in the University, she is fixated on a metonymic trope and does not mediate between it and another trope. Hence, she is polemic. Hence hence, polemics may not be ironic by White's definition...
Just call me scatterbrain. I'll keep on jumping around. I'm actually trying to use this as a sounding board to make sure that I do not go into the project too focused on fitting square pegs into round holes. Am I getting the gist of White's method?
Posted by: TR at February 13, 2005 10:28 AM