Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition

by Susan Miller

This is the first book-length study of the status of composition in English studies and the uneasy relationship between composition and literature. Composition studies and institutional histories of English studies have long needed this kind of clarification of the historical and political contexts of composition teaching, research, and administration.

Susan Miller argues that composition constitutes a major national industry, citing the four million freshman-level students enrolled in such courses each year, the $40 million annual expenditure for textbooks, and the more than $50 million in teacher salaries. But this concrete magnitude is not expressed in political power within departments. Miller calls on her associates in composition to engage in a persistent critique of the social practices and political agenda of the discipline that have been responsible for its institutional marginalization. Drawing on her own long experience as a composition administrator, teacher, and scholar, as well as on a national survey of composition professionals, Miller argues that composition teachers inadvertently continue to foster the negative myth about composition’s place in the English studies hierarchy by assuming an assigned, self-sacrificial cultural identity. Composition has been regarded as subcollegiate, practical, a "how-to," and has been denied intellectual rigor in order to preserve literature’s presentations of quasi-religious textual ideals.

Winner of three major book awards:

The Modern Language Association’s Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize

The Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Outstanding Book Award

The Teachers of Advanced Composition’s W. Ross Winterowd Award

288 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1990

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Susan Miller is a professor of English at the University of Utah. She is the author of Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition, which received the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize from the MLA, the NCTE/CCCC Outstanding Book Award, and the W. Ross Winterowd Award, Assuming the Positions: Cultural Pedagogy and the Politics of Ordinary Writing, which received the NCTE/CCCC Outstanding Book Award and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, Writing: Process and Product; and four other textbooks.

Reviews

[Matt Sautman · Rating 3 out of 5]

What I enjoy about this book is how Susan Miller interrogates political history of composition and how it connects with power. I do feel that for those of us pedagogues who recognize that nothing in the classroom is apolitical, there is less to get out of this book than there is for those who have never considered that idea before. As a scholar who has researched in carnival as a modality through which one may orient their classroom for incorporating sociopolitical content into the classroom, I hoped that Miller would have gone into more detail on this kind of idea, but instead the carnival functions more in relation to the composition’s past rather than its present moment. The first two chapters, I feel, are the strongest in terms of thought provoking content and the most relevant to my interests.

[Cynthia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative regarding the political history of comp/rhet and how scholars might work to enforce the significance of the field as a discipline. Hard to believe, though, that in a book about political resistance and the role of comp/rhet in serving the "underclass," that no reference to Marxist theory is made. Miller does include Marxist theorists like Althusser and, briefly, Bourdieu, but she does not identify them as such. The absence of Marx in American education, and in discussions regarding the second-class citizenship of composition, is like an elephant in the room.