Introduction

In the final months of 2009, the WPA listserv (WPA-L) saw an onslaught of detailed responses to an initial post with the deceptively simple subject line: "How well do your students read ...?" The complete question, posted in the body of the email, sent to the listerv on October 27 by Bob Schwegler (2009) from the University of Rhode Island read: "How well do your students read complex texts — other than literary texts?" With more than fifty responses in just a few days, it became clear that this was an issue that interested a range of subscribers, many of whom responded to the question by drawing on their classroom teaching practices. Some listed useful assignments and methods (e.g., rhetorical analyses, annotation) while others wrote about textbooks that encourage the teaching of reading in composition such as Bartholomae and Petrosky's Ways of Reading and Rosenwasser and Stephen's Writing Analytically.

The majority of the respondents, however, went outside of composition to think about reading. Some encouraged those in composition to turn to the Education Departments at their schools. Others such as Jennifer Wells (2009) shared websites for high school English teachers and names of speakers and other scholars (e.g., Frank Smith) working within K — 12 whose work might be adapted for use by post-secondary instructors. Arguing, on the other hand, that literature instructors are especially well-equipped to teach reading, Ryan Skinnell (2009) looked to the New Critics as exemplars of literature instructors committed to the teaching of reading, which he defines as "comprehension, close reading, critical assessment. I will not, can not, shall not claim that literature specialists are the best reading teachers in the world," writes Skinnell, "But I will, can, and shall claim that they are expert readers with the potential for teaching reading as a valuable function of what English departments claim to do." Overall, the posts are best characterized by Patricia Donahue's (2009) post wherein she writes: "It is curious to me that when the subject of reading comes up those of us in rhetoric/composition veer in one of two directions: towards literature, saying that's what those people teach; or towards developmental reading specialists, trained in more qualitative methods. But we don't refer to the substantial body of work done on reading in our own field (especially in the late eighties to early nineties) — particularly on the interrelationship of reading and writing. Why not?" Interestingly, although subscribers continued to respond to this thread for days after Donahue posted her provocative question, no one addressed or answered it except Bill Thelin (2009b) who suggested "an online study/reading group to discuss the research Patricia talks about" in order to "help us implement it and perhaps contribute to the body of knowledge by creating new applications."

WPA-L subscribers are not the only ones in the field for whom the 1980s and 1990s is not a reference point for scholarship on reading. Histories of the field such as Stephen North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition do not include a discussion of those scholars within composition for whom reading pedagogy was as important as writing pedagogy. More recently, Susan Miller's 1,760-page The Norton Book of Composition Studies and Villanueva and Arola's (2011) 899-page Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, two anthologies that are often used in graduate courses in rhetoric and composition, neglect to include essays on reading despite the overwhelming presence of these in the field during the 1980s and 1990s. This moment wherein attention to reading flourished within composition is simply not a part of standard accounts of composition's history. Neither is it represented in texts used to educate scholars new to the field. Why didn't the subject of reading become integral to how composition defined itself as a field since compositionists were studying reading and developing reading pedagogies at this disciplinary-defining moment? Over the years, hypotheses have been offered as to why reading did not establish itself as one of the field's primary subjects. The first holds the "great divorce" (also called the "great divide") responsible, noting that as composition worked hard to define itself against literary studies in the 1980s it held especially tight to writing instruction since that was the one element that separated these fields from each other. Related to this first hypothesis is the theory that a struggle over disciplinary identity may have been the cause, a struggle that was marked by composition's investment in separating itself not only from literary theory, but also from reading instruction as it was defined by education (particularly K — 12). Another hypothesis is that reading as a subject of inquiry has not disappeared, but that the term "reading" has been subsumed by the broader term "literacy" in much the same way Paul Butler found that attention to style never disappeared from composition, but simply migrated to other areas within composition, including genre studies among others. A final hypothesis has to do with the "social turn," wherein the field's attention turned toward writing's social dimensions and situated the writer as a social being affected by cultural, political, and social forces. While these are viable hypotheses, I am not convinced that they tell the entire story.

Each of these hypotheses looks outside of what I will call "the reading movement" in order to account for reading's inability to take hold in the field. And, while Chapter 4 details the aspects of the discussions from the 1980s and early 1990s that are worth recovering, this book also contends that one contributing factor may actually lie within the scholarship from that movement. This project recovers that scholarship to explore precisely how scholars articulated their theories of reading and how the conflation of the terms "reading" and "literature," as well as differing goals of the scholars, were obstacles that prevented reading from securing its place as a primary focus of the field. These dissonances reigned, and as Kathleen McCormick (1994, 5) points out, in the "absence of such dialogue, work in reading remains fragmented and its transformative capacities limited."

Looking closely at the proliferation of scholarship on reading from the 1980s and 1990s both to imagine what went wrong, as well as to describe what...