Conflict and Consensus: How Composition Scholars View Their Discipline

From the ugly stepchild of the English department to the Cinderella of the Ivy Hall, composition studies have made great progress in recent years. Instead of be ing concerned primarily with plural possessives and dangling modifiers, researchers in composition now speak of paradigm shifts and deconstructing stu dent texts. But in spite of these advances, the status of composition as a discipline is still tentative, and the credos that are in vogue today may, in fact, be as in substantial as Cinderella's horse and carriage. In an effort to measure the progress of scholarship in composition and rhetoric, researchers have turned to a variety of indicators. Several major bibliographies have appeared or are in progress (Tate; Horner; Moran and Lunsford; Bizzell and Herzberg; Lindemann).1 Robert Connors has observed the proliferation and so phistication of journals in the field. And there have been several studies of writing programs at various col leges and universities (Hartzog; Haring-Smith; Chap man and Tate). But although these studies reveal the external apparatus of the discipline, they are not so well suited for indicating the current thinking of those in the field and the central issues in composition research. In order to determine more directly the pulse of the profession, I asked eighteen active scholars in the field to respond to a series of questions about their professional development and about current issues in writing pedagogy and research.2 They represent a va riety of institutions, public and private, with a broad geographical distribution. Most of them did their graduate work in the seventies or late sixties. I asked six questions, each designed to encourage reflection and analysis.