What do you think?
Rate this book
Composition In The University: Historical and Polemical Essays
Composition in the University examines the required introductory course in composition within American colleges and universities. Crowley argues that due to its association with literary studies in English departments, composition instruction has been inappropriately influenced by humanist pedagogy and that modern humanism is not a satisfactory rationale for the study of writing. Crowley envisions possible nonhumanist rationales that could be developed for vertical curricula in writing instruction, were the universal requirement not in place. Composition in the University examines the required introductory course in composition within American colleges and universities. According to Sharon Crowley, the required composition course has never been conceived in the way that other introductory courses have been—as an introduction to the principles and practices of a field of study. Rather it has been constructed throughout much of its history as a site from which larger educational and ideological agendas could be advanced, and such agendas have not always served the interests of students or teachers, even though they are usually touted as programs of study that students “need.”
If there is a master narrative of the history of composition, it is told in the institutional attitude that has governed administration, design, and staffing of the course from its beginnings—the attitude that the universal requirement is in place in order to construct docile academic subjects. Crowley argues that due to its association with literary studies in English departments, composition instruction has been inappropriately influenced by humanist pedagogy and that modern humanism is not a satisfactory rationale for the study of writing. She examines historical attempts to reconfigure the required course in nonhumanist terms, such as the advent of communications studies during the 1940s. Crowley devotes two essays to this phenomenon, concentrating on the furor caused by the adoption of a communications program at the University of Iowa.
Composition in the University concludes with a pair of essays that argue against maintenance of the universal requirement. In the last of these, Crowley envisions possible nonhumanist rationales that could be developed for vertical curricula in writing instruction, were the universal requirement not in place.
Crowley presents her findings in a series of essays because she feels the history of the required composition course cannot easily be understood as a coherent narrative since understandings of the purpose of the required course have altered rapidly from decade to decade, sometimes in shockingly sudden and erratic fashion.
The essays in this book are informed by Crowley’s long career of teaching composition, administering a composition program, and training teachers of the required introductory course. The book also draw on experience she gained while working with committees formed by the Conference on College Composition and Communication toward implementation of the Wyoming Resolution, an attempt to better the working conditions of post-secondary teachers of writing.
If there is a master narrative of the history of composition, it is told in the institutional attitude that has governed administration, design, and staffing of the course from its beginnings—the attitude that the universal requirement is in place in order to construct docile academic subjects. Crowley argues that due to its association with literary studies in English departments, composition instruction has been inappropriately influenced by humanist pedagogy and that modern humanism is not a satisfactory rationale for the study of writing. She examines historical attempts to reconfigure the required course in nonhumanist terms, such as the advent of communications studies during the 1940s. Crowley devotes two essays to this phenomenon, concentrating on the furor caused by the adoption of a communications program at the University of Iowa.
Composition in the University concludes with a pair of essays that argue against maintenance of the universal requirement. In the last of these, Crowley envisions possible nonhumanist rationales that could be developed for vertical curricula in writing instruction, were the universal requirement not in place.
Crowley presents her findings in a series of essays because she feels the history of the required composition course cannot easily be understood as a coherent narrative since understandings of the purpose of the required course have altered rapidly from decade to decade, sometimes in shockingly sudden and erratic fashion.
The essays in this book are informed by Crowley’s long career of teaching composition, administering a composition program, and training teachers of the required introductory course. The book also draw on experience she gained while working with committees formed by the Conference on College Composition and Communication toward implementation of the Wyoming Resolution, an attempt to better the working conditions of post-secondary teachers of writing.
- GenresAcademic
240 pages, Paperback
First published May 28, 1998
5 people are currently reading
26 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 17, 2013
Sharon Crowley’s 1998 book Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays is a rhetorical text about composition, with Crowley ultimately making an argument for the restoration of rhetoric in universities’ first-year composition (FYC) classrooms.
Crowley is forthcoming about the book’s argumentative nature, setting up her project as an ideological examination of composition’s own ideological origins and development rather than an objective historical account. The early pages of the book establish two key aspects of Crowley’s argument. First is her “fundamental assumption … that the humanist approach to the first-year course is not the best approach to teaching composition” (13). The problematic grafting of humanist values onto composition in the latter’s early days, as well as the continuing influence of that grafting, is a refrain repeated by Crowley throughout her book. Second is her claim that “the time has come to reflect seriously on the worth of the universal requirement [of FYC]” (10), which, depending on the reader’s convictions, might serve as either the specter or the promise hanging over the entire text.
The historical portion of the text comprises its second through ninth chapters, and both borrows from and builds on James Berlin’s and Robert J. Connors’ historical accounts of composition. Crowley recounts modern FYC’s emergence at Harvard, an emergence grounded in crises of literacy and values rhetorically manufactured by such Ivy instructors as Adams Sherman Hill following the postbellum broadening of access to higher education. The perceived need to pass on and maintain the ethical, aesthetic, and linguistic traditions of Western civilization via literature led Hill and his allies to create “Freshman English.” Crowley argues “that the invention of Freshman English enabled the creation of English studies” (59), as well as the subordination of composition to literature. As the American university system sought to adopt the German research ideal, composition was construed as a content-less discipline, any rhetorical education subordinated to the humanist project of exposing students to Great Books (and regulating students’ grammar and syntax).
The ever-increasing need for FYC courses, Crowley notes, led to the recruitment of part-timers and graduate students as composition instructors. These new instructors were frequently met with poor working conditions: inadequate facilities, low salaries, little or no benefits, and minimal cultural capital. The class divide between literature and composition became increasingly entrenched during the early twentieth century, with lit becoming the purview of research-oriented tenured and tenure-track faculty, and FYC the drudgework of those instructors at the bottom of the university teaching hierarchy.
Crowley’s extended consideration of Norman Foerster, a University of Iowa English professor who waged an extensive battle against his institution’s implementation of a universal “basic skills” writing course in the 1940s, is an especially interesting case study. Her depiction of Foerster’s doomed humanist crusade is followed by a meditation on the effects of watered-down Deweyan pragmatism (i.e. “basic skills”) on World War II-era educational philosophy and pedagogy. The armed forces’ demanded communication courses for officers, leading to the mingling of composition with communication departments, and the postwar GI Bill led to an unprecedented influx of new college students. These developments necessitated more FYC instructors, which universities afforded by spreading the resources for these instructors ever more thinly.
Following all this, Crowley sees the emergence of process pedagogy in the 1970s as a mixed blessing. She acknowledges that process pedagogy was noteworthy for finally establishing students’ composing practices as a research subject for compositionists, for reintroducing rhetoric—especially rhetorical invention—as a content base for FYC courses, and for gaining comp and its practitioners some measure of disciplinary and institutional clout. She laments, however, the quick “appropriat[ion]” of process pedagogy by current-traditionalism, a non-rhetorical pedagogical approach far more concerned with grammatical correctness than argumentation or invention (211).
Current-traditionalism, along with humanism, is Crowley’s primary punching bag as she shifts from the historical to the “polemical” portion of her book. Her final arguments, however, have implications beyond a critique of current-traditionalism. Crowley argues that the only way for composition to overcome its menial status is the elimination of the universal requirement of FYC. Noting widespread conservative resistance to The University of Texas at Austin’s attempted 1990 reinvention of FYC—E 306, centered on social issues via American legal discourse—she claims composition studies’ subjugation to and tacit forwarding of the university’s broader institutional agenda is inevitable so long as FYC is required. The course can only be unmoored from servility if it is also unmoored from universality. (It is worth noting that she forwards this position in a section entitled “A Modest Proposal,” and that this section’s Swiftian namesake proposes a radical, ironic, undesirable solution only necessary because of larger systemic problems—a connection probably not lost on Crowley.)
Near the end of the book, Crowley puts forth the argument mentioned in this review’s introduction: A call for composition instructors to look to classical rhetorical theory as a model for the subject matter of the de-universalized FYC course. Unlike humanism and current-traditionalism, which purport to know what students need regardless of what students have to say, classical rhetorical theory provides a flexible, socially aware approach to composition and argument much more germane to Crowley’s vision of the first-year course.
Crowley is forthcoming about the book’s argumentative nature, setting up her project as an ideological examination of composition’s own ideological origins and development rather than an objective historical account. The early pages of the book establish two key aspects of Crowley’s argument. First is her “fundamental assumption … that the humanist approach to the first-year course is not the best approach to teaching composition” (13). The problematic grafting of humanist values onto composition in the latter’s early days, as well as the continuing influence of that grafting, is a refrain repeated by Crowley throughout her book. Second is her claim that “the time has come to reflect seriously on the worth of the universal requirement [of FYC]” (10), which, depending on the reader’s convictions, might serve as either the specter or the promise hanging over the entire text.
The historical portion of the text comprises its second through ninth chapters, and both borrows from and builds on James Berlin’s and Robert J. Connors’ historical accounts of composition. Crowley recounts modern FYC’s emergence at Harvard, an emergence grounded in crises of literacy and values rhetorically manufactured by such Ivy instructors as Adams Sherman Hill following the postbellum broadening of access to higher education. The perceived need to pass on and maintain the ethical, aesthetic, and linguistic traditions of Western civilization via literature led Hill and his allies to create “Freshman English.” Crowley argues “that the invention of Freshman English enabled the creation of English studies” (59), as well as the subordination of composition to literature. As the American university system sought to adopt the German research ideal, composition was construed as a content-less discipline, any rhetorical education subordinated to the humanist project of exposing students to Great Books (and regulating students’ grammar and syntax).
The ever-increasing need for FYC courses, Crowley notes, led to the recruitment of part-timers and graduate students as composition instructors. These new instructors were frequently met with poor working conditions: inadequate facilities, low salaries, little or no benefits, and minimal cultural capital. The class divide between literature and composition became increasingly entrenched during the early twentieth century, with lit becoming the purview of research-oriented tenured and tenure-track faculty, and FYC the drudgework of those instructors at the bottom of the university teaching hierarchy.
Crowley’s extended consideration of Norman Foerster, a University of Iowa English professor who waged an extensive battle against his institution’s implementation of a universal “basic skills” writing course in the 1940s, is an especially interesting case study. Her depiction of Foerster’s doomed humanist crusade is followed by a meditation on the effects of watered-down Deweyan pragmatism (i.e. “basic skills”) on World War II-era educational philosophy and pedagogy. The armed forces’ demanded communication courses for officers, leading to the mingling of composition with communication departments, and the postwar GI Bill led to an unprecedented influx of new college students. These developments necessitated more FYC instructors, which universities afforded by spreading the resources for these instructors ever more thinly.
Following all this, Crowley sees the emergence of process pedagogy in the 1970s as a mixed blessing. She acknowledges that process pedagogy was noteworthy for finally establishing students’ composing practices as a research subject for compositionists, for reintroducing rhetoric—especially rhetorical invention—as a content base for FYC courses, and for gaining comp and its practitioners some measure of disciplinary and institutional clout. She laments, however, the quick “appropriat[ion]” of process pedagogy by current-traditionalism, a non-rhetorical pedagogical approach far more concerned with grammatical correctness than argumentation or invention (211).
Current-traditionalism, along with humanism, is Crowley’s primary punching bag as she shifts from the historical to the “polemical” portion of her book. Her final arguments, however, have implications beyond a critique of current-traditionalism. Crowley argues that the only way for composition to overcome its menial status is the elimination of the universal requirement of FYC. Noting widespread conservative resistance to The University of Texas at Austin’s attempted 1990 reinvention of FYC—E 306, centered on social issues via American legal discourse—she claims composition studies’ subjugation to and tacit forwarding of the university’s broader institutional agenda is inevitable so long as FYC is required. The course can only be unmoored from servility if it is also unmoored from universality. (It is worth noting that she forwards this position in a section entitled “A Modest Proposal,” and that this section’s Swiftian namesake proposes a radical, ironic, undesirable solution only necessary because of larger systemic problems—a connection probably not lost on Crowley.)
Near the end of the book, Crowley puts forth the argument mentioned in this review’s introduction: A call for composition instructors to look to classical rhetorical theory as a model for the subject matter of the de-universalized FYC course. Unlike humanism and current-traditionalism, which purport to know what students need regardless of what students have to say, classical rhetorical theory provides a flexible, socially aware approach to composition and argument much more germane to Crowley’s vision of the first-year course.
July 21, 2009
I read it for my doctorate. Though I have different epistemological view than Crowley, her reading of the difficult position of composition in the modern university is brilliant.
December 13, 2012
My professor was a huge fan. I thought it was ok. Composition Theory.
March 20, 2016
This was very helpful for understanding the history of Composition and Rhetoric for school.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews