Hans-Georg Gadamer proposes a philosophical hermeneutics that sheds light on the ways in which scholars have envisioned the history of teaching writing. Offering an alternative to a linear model of history, in which events are viewed as links in a chain, Gadamer's hermeneutics regards a text as a locus or web through which other texts are continuously woven. In this model, the historian is asked to work speculatively rather than prescriptively, attending to the way in which a text suggests, argues with, comments on, or even omits other texts. Over recent years, attempts to understand composition and its theory and practice have arranged themselves into three distinct patterns: (1) works that revitalize the discipline by preserving teaching practices and theories informed by Greco-Roman influences; (2) texts that authorize composition studies based on the work of empirical and theoretical research; and (3) accounts that focus on aspects of institutional theory--handbook usage and textbook publication trends. Gadamer's model presents a network or frame with which to read and evaluate these narrative accounts of the field. It shows, for instance, that Edward P. J. Corbett's attempt to make a case for classical rhetoric on the grounds of a continuity between antiquity and the present depends on his exclusion of expressive rhetorics from his narrative. It also shows that Albert R. Kitzhaber's study of college writing programs excludes many of the bread and butter issues composition programs were struggling with at that time. (TB)