Scholarly disciplines are historical reservoirs riven with contradictions. Often unaware of their own history, the humanities lead in complications, with English departments outpacing other fields of study. Both writing and English language and literature studies exhibit long-standing omissions and conflicts. This essay explores their similarities…

Basic writing, which developed as a field within the larger discipline of rhetoric and composition, has a tumultuous past and an uncertain future. What began as an academic response to a perceived literacy crisis with the rise of open admissions in the late 1960s has continued to grow and reinvent its structures, theories, and practices as new…

This essay provides an account of The Ohio State University's (OSU) rhetoric department during the tenure of Joseph Villiers Denney, arguing that he appropriated and repurposed national trends in education and rhetoric in ways that complicate the narrative of rhetoric and composition's decline in the late nineteenth century. In this essay, the…

The issue of the "best" type of teacher education currently under discussion led us towards a historic-ethnographic study dealing with the teacher education approach of the English Department which existed at Oranim Academic College of Education in the years 1971-2001. Seven teachers and former Heads of Department were interviewed, as…

This essay argues that a trend in histories of literary and writing studies is to bifurcate the origins of the fields and so engage in those modernist narrative fallacies described by Jean-Francois Lyotard. Such works limit our understanding of past practices and the longstanding connections between disciplinarity and labor. (Contains 2 notes.)

This dissertation examines how nomenclature and the act of naming shapes disciplinary identities for scholars and teachers of rhetoric and composition. The discipline is named differently by many of its members, sometimes called "composition studies," "writing studies," "composition and rhetoric," "rhetorical…

In the last 15 years, writing center scholars have increasingly called for more evidence to validate writing centers' practices. Work by Paula Gillespie (2002), Neal Lerner (2009), and Isabelle Thompson et al. (2009) underscore this need. Missing from these discussions, however, is a thorough understanding of the past and current research…

This study yields a broader understanding of the "development of rhetorical instruction in the American college" (Gold 15) by focusing on the composition programs at two little studied universities. This dissertation addresses the descriptions of composition courses as these appear in the course catalogs of two different kinds of…

A personal memoir of Marjorie Hope Nicolson and the graduate English department she headed at Columbia University in the 1940s and 1950s. (SJL)

Discusses the role of ideology in discourse theory. Suggests that an informed self-consciousness about the complex sources of thinking and writing can inspire involvement and willingness to share discursive power in the English department's conversation. (MS)

Discusses problems with first-year composition in higher education, primarily the marginality and the tenuous hold writing maintains within the academy. Reconsiders the English department's role in serving the general curriculum. (SR)

This essay offers a history of a basic writing course that began at a public ivy campus in the 1970s. Relying on principles of universal design and on insights derived from his school's studio program about ways the institution's selective functions can impact curricular matters, the author describes how the basic writing course was merely…

Harold H. Kolb, Jr., introduces three historical discussions of graduate education in English. C. Hugh Holman discusses "The Desperate Soldier-Scholars: Graduate Study in English, 1946-1956." Robert Kellogg discusses "The Boom Years: Graduate Education in English, 1955-1968." Fred L. Standley considers "'Living Modernly's Living Quickly': Beyond…

Discusses "new rhetoric" within the context of the modern English department. Presents a brief history of the development of the traditional English curriculum through the 18th and 19th century. (JD)

Discusses the many contributions of Rewey Belle Inglis, a secondary English teacher, university English educator, and textbook publisher, as well as first woman president of the National Council of Teachers of English (1929). Discusses her professional credentials, her place in history, her writings (about teaching grammar and literature, teacher…