Changing the question: Should writing be studied?

Composition Studies, Spring 2003 by Trimbur, John

Composition Studies, Volume 31, Number 1, Spring 2003

Rhetoric and composition, like any academic field, takes shape in crucial respects through debate about the identity of the discipline, the work it values, the questions it raises, and the practices it endorses. If anything, the history of the field can be seen as a matter of what Victor Villanueva so tellingly calls "cross talk." Sometimes, such cross talk takes place live and in person, as in the case of CCCC sessions in which Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg debated Lil Brannon and C. H. Knoblauch about academic discourse or Peter Elbow and David Bartholomae debated writing with and without teachers. More often, though, these exchanges take place in writing. I think of, say, the Janice Lauer-Ann Bertoff debate about invention in the early 1970s and the debate between Maxine Hairston and composition's cultural left in the 1990s, but fill in your favorite examples.

A few years ago, I had resigned myself to the withering away of such discipline-defining debates, as the field became more professionalized and internally differentiated ("Close Reading" 137). But I was wrong, and another debate is currently brewing. You can see signs of it, for example, in Gary A. Olson's response to Wendy Bishop's argument in the lead article of a special issue of College Composition and Communication. According to Bishop, the teaching of writing has fallen victim to the theorists whose convoluted prose has taken the "joy" out of writing, and self-identified "expressivists" such as herself are being marginalized by the theory machine (a claim Olson-and I-find suspect on the grounds she was, after all, elected chair of CCCC). From Olson's perspective, Bishop's complaint represents a "backlash" against the hard-earned work of composition theorists to make the field intellectually respectable.

Now, if my sympathies are largely with Olson in the new "theory war," I cannot in this article do justice to the full range of issues involved. Instead, I want to look at a particular aspect of this debate, namely the current interest in thinking about rhetoric and composition not just as a required first-year course but as a program of study. It is not accidental, perhaps, that back-to-back chapters by Charles Bazerman and Susan Miller in Olson's recently edited collection Rhetoric and Composition as Intellectual Work both call for "writing studies," in Bazerman's words, as a "major discipline," and, in Miller's, as an integrative "mode of inquiry." To my mind, these two chapters, along with the recent trend to establish free-standing writing programs, four-year writing curricula, and departments with majors and minors, indicate an important shift in the questions our field is asking about the work we do. To put these questions in perspective, let me go back thirty years, to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when advocates of the "new rhetoric" were trying to clarify their theory and practice of writing instruction. Coincidently, this was also the time I started teaching writing, and I remember being both troubled and intrigued by a question that notable people in the field were asking, namely "Can writing be taught?" I found the question troubling because I thought teaching writing was what I had been hired to do, as a part-time instructor of basic writing in an open admissions program. At the same time, since I had had no experience teaching writing before nor any training in rhetoric and composition, I was intrigued, as a newcomer, that this field was asking such a fundamental question about its own activity. I could not imagine literature faculty asking whether literature can be taught or such a question arising in American Studies, where I had done my graduate work, or any other academic field for that matter.

What I could not have known at the time, but that seems clear in retrospect, is how the terms of the question "Can writing be taught?" belong to a particular moment when the new rhetoric was extricating itself from what it called current-traditional rhetoric. Richard Young's "Arts, Crafts, Gifts, and Knacks: Some Disharmonies in the New Rhetoric" introduced me to the question. Young notes that the current-traditional rhetoric, such as John Genung's, divides the activity of composing into, on one hand, an art which depends on the predispositions of the composer and cannot be taught and, on the other, a craft which amounts to the technical knowledge of conventions and mechanics teachers can impart to their students. "All the work of origination," Genung says, "must be left to the writer himself (qtd. in Young 53-54) in one of those statements readers now recognize as the well-known neglect of invention that marks a key dividing point between current-traditional and new rhetorics. For Genung, invention is a rhetorical capacity that exists mysteriously, he says, "in the writer himself, in the peculiar bent of his nature" (qtd. in Young 54).

Today, of course, we might well remark on the class bias in Genung's thoroughly gendered "bent of his nature" and look for the forms of cultural capital, including the rhetorical labor of invention, that Genung both hides and defends by making them unteachable and inaccessible to analysis. But there is also another division on the question "Can writing be taught?" that Young brings to light. This time, though, it appears within the ranks of the new rhetoric-in what Frank D'Angelo termed the "new romanticism." As Young explains, the new romantics, by putting prime emphasis on the imagination, "maintain that the composing process is, or should be, relatively free of deliberate control" (55). William E. Coles, Jr.'s notion of teaching writing as writing provides the terms. Like Genung, Coles sees writing in part as an unteachable art: "the teaching of writing as writing is the teaching of writing as art. When writing is not taught as art, as more than a craft or skill, it is not writing that is being taught, but something else . . . . On the other hand, art because it is art, cannot be taught" (qtd. in Young 55). Unlike Genung, however, Coles does not give up on teaching the unteachable. Instead, he poses the paradox that "what is wanted . . . is a way of teaching what cannot be taught, a course to make possible what no course can do" (qtd. in Young 55).