Rewriting Composition: Terms of Exchange

by Bruce Horner

Bruce Horner’s Rewriting Terms of Exchange shows how dominant inflections of key terms in composition—language, labor, value/evaluation, discipline, and composition itself—reinforce composition’s low institutional status and the poor working conditions of many of its instructors and tutors. Placing the circulation of these terms in multiple contemporary contexts, including globalization, world Englishes, the diminishing role of labor and the professions, the “information” economy, and the privatization of higher education, Horner demonstrates ways to challenge debilitating definitions of these terms and to rework them and their relations to one another. Each chapter of Rewriting Composition focuses on one key term, discussing how limitations set by dominant definitions shape and direct what compositionists do and how they think about their work. The first chapter, “Composition,” critiques a discourse of composition as lacking and therefore as in need of being either put to an end, renamed, aligned with other fields, or supplemented with work in other disciplines or other forms of composition. Rather than seeing composition as something to be abandoned, replaced, or supplemented, Horner suggests ways of productively engaging with the ordinary work of composition whose ostensible lack is assumed in the dominant discourse. Subsequent chapters apply this reconsideration to other key terms, critiquing dominant conceptions of “language” and English as stable; examining how “labor” in composition is divorced from the productive force of social relations to which language work contributes; rethinking the terms of value by which the labor of composition teachers, administrators, and students is measured; and questioning the application of conventional definitions of professional academic disciplinarity to composition. By exposing limitations in dominant conceptions of the work of composition and by modeling and opening up space for new conceptions of key terms, Rewriting Composition offers teachers of composition and rhetoric, writing scholars, and writing program administrators the critical tools necessary for charting the future of composition studies.

279 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 15, 2016

Reviews

[Laurel Perez · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I like most about this book is that Horner refuses to make broad sweeping claims that any one of the terms he discusses (ie. composition, or English) can be bound up in a single straightforward definition. Instead he asks why we need new terms at all, when the umbrella terms that we already have, such as composition already account for the multitude of meanings we keep giving new names. He does give some general definitions, but is clear that each term is far too complex. I like that he wants to in some ways. Get rid of all of the terms such as ‘new composition’ and ‘digital this’ and ‘digital that’ -- we don’t need to reinvent the wheel is the point, composition for example means more than simply composing for Horner, it is that and the teaching of composition in whatever ways that takes shape. Moreover, he attempts to look at the disparities of labor, evaluation, and value of teaching composition and work in academia. This is an important book for those that teach.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

A scrupulous and eloquent rethinking of several of the key terms we use to define composition—which Horner identifies not only as the course in writing we teach to first-year students, but also as the field of study that has grown up around that course, and as those moments and sites when teachers and students pay particular attention to the workings of language in the "material social realm". A fine example of what it means to do theory, and not simply cite popular theorists.