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WHAT WE ARE BECOMING

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Foreword Janice M. Lauer..........................................................................................................................................................................viiIntroduction: Forging Connections Among Undergraduate Writing Majors Greg A. Giberson and Thomas A. Moriarty......................................................................................11 A Major in Flexibility Rebecca de Wind Mattingly and Patricia Harkin...........................................................................................................................132 Redefining the Undergraduate English Writing Major: An Integrated Approach at a Small Comprehensive University Randy Brooks, Peiling Zhao, and Carmella Braniger...............................323 Restorying Disciplinary Relationships: The Development of an Undergraduate Writing Concentration Lisa Langstraat, Mike Palmquist, and Kate Kiefer..............................................504 Outside the English Department: Oakland University's Writing Program and the Writing and Rhetoric Major Wallis May Andersen....................................................................675 "Between the idea and the reality ... falls the Shadow": The Promise and Peril of a Small College Writing Major Kelly Lowe and William Macauley................................................816 The Writing Major as Shared Commitment Rodney F. Dick..........................................................................................................................................987 Dancing with Our Siblings: The Unlikely Case for a Rhetoric Major David Beard..................................................................................................................1308 Writing Program Development and Disciplinary Integrity: What's Rhetoric Got to Do with It? Lori Baker and Teresa Henning.......................................................................1539 Remembering the Canons' Middle Sisters: Style, Memory, and the Return of the Progymnasmata in the Liberal Arts Writing Major Dominic F. Delli Carpini and Michael J. Zerbe.....................17710 Civic Rhetoric and the Undergraduate Major in Rhetoric and Writing Thomas A. Moriarty and Greg Giberson........................................................................................20411 Composing Multiliteracies and Image: Multimodal Writing Majors for a Creative Economy Joddy Murray.............................................................................................21712 Not Just Another Pretty Classroom Genre: The Uses of Creative Nonfiction in the Writing Major Celest Martin....................................................................................22513 The Writing Arts Major: A Work in Process Jennifer Courtney, Deb Martin, and Diane Penrod......................................................................................................24314 "What Exactly is This Major?" Creating Disciplinary Identity through an Introductory Course Sanford Tweedie, Jennifer Courtney, and William I. Wolff...........................................26015 Toward a Description of Undergraduate Writing Majors Lee Campbell and Debra Jacobs.............................................................................................................277Afterword Susan H. McLeod.........................................................................................................................................................................287About the Contributors.............................................................................................................................................................................290

Chapter One

Rebecca de Wind Mattingly Patricia Harkin

In this essay our argument will be that a post-disciplinary major in rhetoric and composition is a particularly good idea for research-intensive universities in the current technological and fiscal states of affairs. We shall describe the benefits such a major would potentially offer to contemporary students, to the faculty members who teach them, to tertiary institutions (especially state-sponsored ones) in general, and even to multinational capital. We shall also necessarily describe the institutional impedimenta that such an innovation is likely to encounter. Finally, we describe a course that might serve as the entry to such a major at research-intensive universities.

We begin by emphasizing that our argument is for rhetoric and composition as a major-not as a discipline. Historical and theoretical arguments about disciplinary status for rhetoric have already been made by many scholars and critics from many points of view (Lauer, Mailloux, Harkin, North, Sosnoski), and it is not our intention to rehearse them here. Our concern is institutional: As Steven Mailloux observes in Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition, "academic disciplines are hierarchically organized, institutionally supported, self-perpetuating networks of practices for knowledge production and transmission.... That is, disciplines are, fundamentally, the transformation of practical wisdom into accredited techniques" (2006, 5). In one sense, of course, the network of practices that such scholars as Sharon Crowley, Victor Vitanza, Susan Miller, Richard Lanham, Susan Jarratt, Michael Leff, and Chaim Perelman have called "rhetoric" has existed since the fifth century BCE. The transmission of those practices, however, has occurred in such diverse institutional venues as departments of English, speech, communication, journalism, media studies, classics, political science, schools of business, and online instruction in winning friends and influencing people. In most research-intensive universities, no single institutional venue has been the locus in which the practical wisdom known as rhetoric is transformed into accredited techniques.

Techniques become "accredited" through institutions such as departments, curricula, and majors. In most research-intensive universities, it is not currently possible for an undergraduate to earn a baccalaureate degree in rhetoric and composition in a department of that name. One can be an English major with a writing emphasis or a communication major who concentrates on composing and analyzing "speeches." One can be a literature major with an affection for "rhetoric" as Paul de Man used the term in the 1970s and '80s. One can get an MA or PhD in rhetoric and composition. And one can get an undergraduate degree in journalism or writing for the media.

Our argument is that rhetoric and composition should have an institutional space-a tenured and tenurable faculty, adequate office space, a budget, a copy machine, and at least one administrative assistant. In that way, (and perhaps only in that way) within the university's own symbolic system of value, rhetoric and composition can be understood not only as a service but also as an institutionally constituted area of inquiry.

Because its networks of practices are not available to undergraduates as a single major under that name, rhetoric (and composition) lacks the status that comes in the academy from a unique budget and the other aforementioned perquisites. That prestige, or lack of it, is noticed and felt on the pulses of undergraduate...