MAPPING THE TURN TO DISCIPLINARITY

A Historical Analysis of Composition's Trajectory and Its Current Moment

Kathleen Blake Yancey

We have made ourselves a new discipline. ...

— Robert J. Connors

One way of thinking about both the history of Rhetoric and its current moment, especially in the context of disciplinarity, is provided through the metaphor of turns. The oft-cited social turn (Trimbur 1994) marks a shift from a more individually located composing to a sociocultural model, while other turns — the public (Farmer 2013); the queer (Alexander and Wallace 2009); the archival (Yancey 2004); and the global (Composition Studies) — continue to compete for attention. Of course, the expression the "x turn" is often employed simply as a quick reference, as a way of indicating that a new practice or theoretical orientation is gaining ground. Other times, however, the expression is used to articulate a shift of the Trimburian kind, that is, of a historical demarcation of the field. Paul Lynch (2014), for instance, has recently theorized what he understands as a(nother) new turn, that of the apocalyptic:

Composition now faces a somewhat paradoxical turn, one in which the ground ... may be solid but is also corrupted. I am speaking of an apocalyptic turn, in which the end of the world looms ever larger in our disciplinary and pedagogical imagination. Ours is of course not the first generation to worry about the world's end. ... But the field does seem to be thinking more and more about what composition ought to do in the face of serious dangers to human flourishing. A growing list of authors — including Derek Owens, Kurt Spellmeyer, Lynn Worsham, and others — share a basic perspective: economic disruption, endless violence, and, perhaps most important, environmental collapse should force us to reexamine what it means to work in the field of composition, and this reexamination should go to the very heart of what composition means. (458)

Lynch's move here, much like John Trimbur's before him, is to stake a claim on the grounds of synthesis: in this logic, given the work of certain leading scholars all raising similar concerns, we can identify a turn, a shift to something new that provides a provocative and different trajectory than had been anticipated. The intent of a proposal like Lynch's, like Trimbur's before him, is in part to raise (and answer) important questions occupying the center of the field, ones that can help us move forward — and in equal part to write the history of the field as it develops.

John Trimbur's (1994) articulation of the social turn was expressed in a review essay for College Composition and Communication, "Taking the Social Turn: Teaching Writing Post-Process," where he contextualized and reviewed three books relative to the field's history and, more particularly, to the particular historical moment of the review. If we have experienced a social turn, he asks, what precisely is it, and what does it tell us about the field and its theories and practices? As Trimbur's example illustrates, establishing that we are in the midst of a turn, or have experienced a turn, is no small achievement: weaving the work of others into a coherent account that both looks back and looks forward, the writer is able to characterize previous scholarship, theories, and practices, and motivate new work in line with the turn just defined. Put succinctly, the rhetoric of such a turn can change both the forward movement of the field as well as our perception of its progression.

My aim in this chapter is to do likewise: working in a manner somewhat similar to Trimbur's, I trace here what I see as the field's turn to disciplinarity, not, however, based principally on what has already occurred, but rather on what is occurring in the current moment. Of course, what's happening in the current moment of the field is considerable — from continued interest in pedagogy to a resurgence of research into questions of continuing interest to the field (e.g., how students compose) and the development of new research activity (e.g., drawing from archives, analyzing big data). It's also worth noting my own usage here in referring to us as a field. By most accounts we are a field at least; in terms of categorization, it's easier to call ourselves a field precisely because field-ness requires a lower threshold than a discipline does. We might pursue a field of interest without the methodology of a discipline, for example, and of course the two terms are also related, as Kristine Hansen suggests (this volume), to the idea of a profession. My focus here is on the more contentious issue of disciplinarity, my argument that we are making a disciplinary turn, shifting from field to disciplinarity, as four recurring themes collectively demonstrate. Here, then, after providing a brief account of the field's recent history, I more fully analyze the rhetoric of the social turn as a context for our current disciplinary turn; demonstrate that without our being very aware of it, we have begun to see the field as a discipline; and identify four trends in particular influencing this movement toward a recognition and embrace of disciplinarity: (1) a renewed research agenda, including continuing research into and theory about transfer of writing knowledge and practice; (2) the development of projects consolidating what the field has established as knowledge; (3) the continuing development of the major in Rhetoric and Composition; and (4) the changing location of Writing Studies within institutional structures. Based on this analysis, I conclude with several questions intended, first, to guide the reading of this volume speaking to Rhetoric and Composition's disciplinarity and, second, to frame the field's way forward.

A(NOTHER) HISTORY OF RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF A TURN

A very simple narrative of the discipline can be divided into five episodes. A first episode: In the middle of the twentieth century in the United States, teachers of composition, in the midst of teaching a group of students new to the academy, banded together to share knowledge about how to teach writing. Their subject matter was language, their role teaching, their practice enhanced by borrowings from linguistics, itself a discipline eager to be applied. In the second episode of this narrative, Composition focused on another subject matter, the composing process, which provided a focus both for researchers attempting to develop models of composing and for teachers helping students develop as writers. Process, in other words, became the new content, studied by teachers who were also scholars, and the dual identity of teacher-scholar became something of an idealized model for the community's members. In the third episode of this narrative, the field took what has become a trope for it, a turn, in this case a turn to cultural theory influenced by revolutionaries such as Paulo Freire, by Marxist critics such as Terry Eagleton, and by streetwise literacy researchers such as Alan Luke. In this episode, theory displaced research while underscoring the field's commitment to students and making the field look more like its literary cousins. In the fourth episode, the field, still influenced by all the activities in the previous episodes, returned to teaching as its subject matter, particularly in light of seemingly intractable labor problems plaguing the field and haunting the field's ethos. This turn, or return, to teaching offered several benefits. One: with teaching as subject matter, the field's members could teach what they wanted to teach as long as writing was included; in this moment, the content of the class was the prerogative of the teacher. Two: with teaching as a subject matter, the members of the community could continue a commitment to a field-ness, rather than to disciplinarity, speaking to our ethos; a field seems open, welcoming, and democratic, available especially to all members of the community, a discipline, closed, exclusive, and hierarchical, substituting its own content for the student who has consistently provided the center of the field and supplied its raison d'être. In the current moment, the fifth episode, Rhetoric and Composition seems to be making a disciplinary turn.

Before considering the context for a disciplinary turn, however, it's worth pausing to consider the role that any turn can play in the field. During the third episode described above, John Trimbur coined the phrase "social turn" as a way of describing the contributions of three books he was reviewing, all of which distinguished the early composing process theory from the postprocess composing theory "represent[ing] literacy as an ideological arena and composing as a cultural activity":

What is significant about these books — and to my mind indicative of the current moment in rhetoric and composition studies — is that they make their arguments not so much in terms of students' reading and writing processes but rather in terms of the cultural politics of literacy. In this regard, taken together, the three books [Patricia Bizzell's (1992) Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness, C. H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon's Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy, and Kurt Spellmeyer's Common Ground: Dialogue, Understanding, and the Teaching of Composition] can be read as statements that both reflect and (especially in Bizzell's case) enact what has come to be called the "social turn" of the 1980s, a post-process, post-cognitivist theory and pedagogy that represent literacy as an ideological arena and composing as a cultural activity by which writers position and reposition themselves in relation to their own and others' subjectivities, discourses, practices, and institutions. (Trimbur 1994,109)

Here, Trimbur marks the divide between early models of composing more focused on the individual and the later, more situated models sensitive especially to ideological pressures, a move not unlike that made by Maxine Hairston (1982), in "Winds of Change," as she divides the earlier current-traditional models of teaching writing from newer models enacting then-current composing process ones. For our purposes, the key difference in these two characterizations of a shift, apart from their views of composing (a difference that is considerable), is that Trimbur names the shift as the social turn, uses it as part of his title for the review essay, and then continually refers to it throughout the essay, a process that allows him to define it and consider its consequence. In his review essay, we thus learn not only about the three books under review, but also, and more important, about how they collectively articulate the divide between prior and new composing theory and how, in addressing the "disillusion" generated by the earlier "process paradigm," they as part of the social turn can provide a remedy addressing those ills.

In fact, one might say that these books result from a crisis within the process paradigm and a growing disillusion with its limits and pressures. When process pedagogy emerged on the scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s, process teachers and theorists sought to free themselves from the formalism of current-traditional rhetoric and return the text to the student composer. But the distinction between product and process, which initially seemed so clarifying, not only proved conceptually inadequate to what writers do when they are writing, it also made writing instruction appear to be easier than it is. (109)

In addition, as Trimbur continues defining the social turn in the context of the review, we learn about the role that belief and intention play in the turn. In developing a theory of writing that is social, Bizzell's hope, as Trimbur explains, is that students would learn to work comfortably within "the academic world view without abandoning home perspectives or becoming deracinated (22–23)" (117).

This hope, embodied in the first nine articles collected in Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness, instituted, as it were, a charter of belief for the social turn I have alluded to. The perspective that emerged, which represents discourse communities not as static and hermetically sealed entities tied together by formal linguistic conventions but as dynamic ones with permeable textual and social boundaries, has inspired scholars in writing across the curriculum and the rhetoric of inquiry and also has exerted a useful pressure on the process movement — both on cognitivists who have begun to redescribe their object of inquiry in socio-cognitive terms, and on expressivists who are paying more attention to the voice in academic discourse instead of just writing it off as impersonal and jargon-laden. (117)

The social turn, in this version of history-in-the-making, thus not only marks a shift, but also acts as a corrective to previous theory. As important, invoking Patricia Bizzell as a leading participant in the social turn, Trimbur points to "a charter of belief," which is a kind of ideological commitment shared by those professing this theory.

Had the social turn remained merely the title of Trimbur's review essay, or a formation specific to him alone, it would be an interesting concept, but only one among many vying for significance. But the social turn as rhetorical construct captured simply and elegantly a shift that had already occurred — and it is now seen as something of a watershed moment in the field, in part because of Trimbur's able synopsis of changes underway, but also in part because of the way in which other scholars have also invoked the social turn, employing it as an historical signpost, as a schema for new theory, and as grounds for critique. Beth Daniell (1999), for instance, cites the social turn as a warrant for her own work in literacy:

In 1986 Lester Faigley analyzed three competing theories of the writing process: the expressive, the cognitive, and the social. Although calling for a synthesis, Faigley was clearly endorsing the social view. He identified four strands of research which contributed to the social perspective he was advocating: post-structuralist theories of language, sociology of science, ethnographies of literacy and language, and Marxism. Two of these four, ethnography and Marxism, contributed texts about literacy that were instrumental in helping composition studies make what has been called the social turn (Trimbur, Taking; Bizzell, Academic 202). Indeed the move in composition studies away from the individualistic and cognitive perspectives of the seventies and early eighties toward the social theories and political consciousness that prevail today was encouraged, pushed along, impelled by competing narratives of literacy. These days, literacy, the term and concept, connects composition, with its emphasis on students and classrooms, to the social, political, economic, historical, and cultural. (393)

Likewise, in introducing the 2003 special issue of the Journal of Second Language Writing addressing postprocess, Dwight Atkinson (2003, 3) sets the tone of the issue by invoking the social turn — "I first encountered the term 'post-process' in John Trimbur's 1994 review essay, 'Taking the Social Turn: Teaching Writing Post-Process'" — before calling on Trimbur's definition of the social turn as a tool to scaffold his own analysis of the current moment in L2 writing: "In this introduction to the special issue, I attempt to lay out a coherent if still-heuristic notion of 'post-process.' I do so by first investigating four components of Trimbur's definition of 'post-process': the social; the post-cognitivist; literacy as an ideological arena; and composition as a cultural activity" (Atkinson 2003, 4). And not least, Richard Fulkerson (2005), some eleven years after Trimbur's review essay, employs the social turn as object of critique in his 2005 "Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century": "Specifically, I shall argue that the 'social turn' in composition, the importation of cultural studies from the social sciences and literary theory, has made a writing teacher's role deeply problematic. I will argue that expressivism, despite numerous poundings by the cannons of postmodernism and resulting eulogies, is, in fact, quietly expanding its region of command. Finally, I'll argue that the rhetorical approach has now divided itself in three" (655).

The social turn, in other words, is now a recognizable moment in the field: it helps organize the field, provides exigence for new scholarship, and enables a kind of interrogation of practice and theory.

SOUNDING NOTES OF DISCIPLINARITY

My own sense is that we are in the midst of a new turn, a disciplinary turn that will influence the field as much as, if not more than, the social turn. I'm not sure how I would date the beginnings of this current turn — as members of the field, we can't seem to forge agreement on when the modern iteration of the field itself began, as Kristine Hansen notes, (this volume), with 1949 and 1963 vying among others for the honor — but for at least twenty years now scholars have been talking about our (potential) disciplinarity and what that might mean. Robert Connors, for instance, both in his talk for the inaugural Watson Conference in 1996 and in the 1999 publication that followed, History, Reflection, and Narrative: The Professionalization in Composition 1963–1983, identified the conference itself as a sign of our nascent disciplinarity:

The 1996 Watson Conference at Louisville was in some ways the outward and visible sign of who we have become. The reality of what we have been making is all around us at every Conference on College Composition and Communication, but the Watson Conference was the first meeting I know of that was specifically meant to look at the meanings of our making. What does it mean, what will it mean, for us to be a recognizable discipline, as opposed to a group of marginalized enthusiasts coming together for support and sympathy that we were 35 years ago? (Connors 1999, 3–4)