The Core of the Research We Do

In her provocative plenary talk at the opening session of the WPA conference this past weekend in Denver, Andrea Lunsford challenged her audience to rethink what it is we "compositionists" study. It is writing, obviously, or rhetoric and composition; but what is that? If, as Aristotle says, rhetoric deals with whatever subjects or ideas people have in common (ha koina) and does not have a field or discipline (episteme) of its own (1.1, 1354a2-3), perhaps the same is true of "writing studies," or "rhet/comp," or whatever we decide to call it? Perhaps, in fact, our uncertainty over what to call the field is reflective of its lack of a unified subject matter, and thus of an episteme of its own? One of Lunsford’s points, taken from John Guillory at a recent lecture delivered at Stanford, was that writing is the most important skill in the professional world today, and yet the discipline devoted to improving students’ ability to perform that skill is despised. Why? Because that field or discipline has no real field or discipline? Because the members of that field or discipline have been lax in articulating what it is they (we) do?

My first thought, listening to Lunsford’s talk, was that English doesn’t exactly have a unified field or discipline either. But of course many English professors specializing in the study of literature would say that literature is the core of English department research and teaching; and even though that notion marginalizes writing, linguistics, and English education, essentially making English departments an impure mixture of disciplines in need of purification or purgation, that doesn’t seem to pose a serious threat to the literary “core.” Many literature professors, in fact, have welcomed the splitting off of writing programs into separate departments or centers for that very reason: get rid of the stuff that doesn’t really belong.

So that inner protest against Lunsford’s challenge came to nothing, in the end: I realized, sitting there, that English departments do have a core, a center, and by contrast writing, linguistics, and English ed do not (at least in this country: writing studies is virtually nonexistent in other countries, and linguistics tends to be the core that organizes departments of modern languages, including English, in European universities).

And yet, obviously, English departments tend to remain highly respected even when they lose or expel their writing programs, linguistics course offerings, and other "peripheral" non-literary appendages. This suggests that the source of that respect has nothing to do with professional applications and everything to do with the socio-ideological clout of literature, perhaps based on the Romantic cult of the creative genius, but perhaps also on pervasive ideological assumptions about the "humanizing" power of literature—its ability to raise its readers to a higher cultural potency. Law schools, after all, are widely said to "like" English majors because "they can write"—but that liking and the belief it is apparently based on are almost certainly linked not to the course or two or three English departments typically offer in "writing," but to the dozen or more courses English majors are required to take in literature. Reading literature somehow magically teaches English majors to write.

This would suggest that the pathway to expanded institutional/intellectual respect for writing studies lies not through a convincing rearticulation of what we study but through magic—the magic of ideology—and since few of us, I suspect, are magicians, it may well be (this was my next inner protest) that there is nothing, really, we can do. It’s hopeless. Writing memos (Guillory’s example in "The Memo and Modernity," cited by Lunsford) may be far more important in the working world than reading literature, but that pragmatic professional importance is not going to alter the ideological balance between the production of despised written texts and the reception of venerated ones.

Still, as I walked away from Lunsford’s plenary, and in the days that followed, I couldn’t shake her challenge. It kept nagging at me. What is the core of the research we do? Is it just "writing"? Is it just the production of despised written texts, like memos and instruction manuals and proposals? Worse, is it just the production of "English papers" or "essays" or "themes" or "compositions"—texts that are not only despised but decisively cut off from pragmatic usefulness in the workplace, including the academic workplace? And even if we attempt to shore up the usefulness of the essay by theorizing the "academic article" as an essay, and thus our work as significantly contributing to academic literacy, how exactly does that help our case? Haven't the best and the brightest been learning how to write publishable academic articles without our help for centuries? And, given that our colleagues in other departments typically don’t believe in "writing" in our sense of the word, as a discipline-specific rhetorical appeal to a well-organized audience—writing for them is often sheer mechanics—how exactly does a close linkage between our field and academic writing help our case? First-year students, we say, need to learn to write "academic essays" for their other professors; but those other professors typically don’t want "academic essays" from their students, either because they don’t require their students to write at all (seniors in my applied writing classes almost without exception tell me that the last writing assignments they faced were in their first-year writing classes) or because all they expect from student writing is good grammar, punctuation, and spelling; and in any case instruction in "academic writing" only prepares students (if at all) for the next three-plus years of their lives. How, again, does our promise to deliver that instruction improve our intellectual and institutional status?