Composing Ourselves: Politics, Commitment, and the Teaching of Writing

The tradition that has grown into the CCCC Chair's address now casts a fairly long shadow, one that has certainly shadowed me in the long months separating David Bartholomae's brilliant 1988 address and this 1989 Opening General Session. The opportunity to talk openly on a public occasion about what is uppermost in one's mind is a rare occasion indeed, and it has provided me with the luxury of long reflection. What is most on my mind, I idly wondered on the way home from our 1988 St. Louis meeting. And I was suddenly terrified by a kind of eerie silence between my ears-and forcefully reminded of my Granny's scorn for a fellow (the local sheriff, actually) she said had nothing much at all on his mind. Honey, once that fellow's told you my Granny said, he's told you all he knows. So it was a relief to me, as the months skittered past, to find that I wouldn't have to come to this session, say howdy, and sit down. That relief has made me no less nervous, however. Just last night, in fact, I dreamed that I got up to give this address, delivered the first page, turned to page two and found only one word on it: linguine. I shuffled wildly through all the other pages, each of which held the same text: linguine. Now, I know of the strong connection in the history of rhetoric between rhetoric and cooking (see Plato; Vitanza; Crowley, A Plea for the Revival of Sophistry; Leonardi; and the Nutrostylistics panel of the 1985 CCCC [Brown, Faigley, Halloran, Eating, Herrington, Lunsford, Ruszkiewicz, Secor, Selzer]), but that connection did little to calm me when I woke in a panic. So I've had to spend the morning reminding myself that I do have something to say to you other than linguine or howdy. Indeed, I do have some things on my mind, things I want to say about Composing Ourselves, things that relate to the fortieth birthday of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and to our coming of middle age.' As you know, our history as a profession-certainly in the span