MAPPING THE TURN TO DISCIPLINARITY

A Historical Analysis of Composition's Trajectory and Its Current Moment

Kathleen Blake Yancey

We have made ourselves a new discipline. ...

— Robert J. Connors

One way of thinking about both the history of Rhetoric and its current moment, especially in the context of disciplinarity, is provided through the metaphor of turns. The oft-cited social turn (Trimbur 1994) marks a shift from a more individually located composing to a sociocultural model, while other turns — the public (Farmer 2013); the queer (Alexander and Wallace 2009); the archival (Yancey 2004); and the global (Composition Studies) — continue to compete for attention. Of course, the expression the "x turn" is often employed simply as a quick reference, as a way of indicating that a new practice or theoretical orientation is gaining ground. Other times, however, the expression is used to articulate a shift of the Trimburian kind, that is, of a historical demarcation of the field. Paul Lynch (2014), for instance, has recently theorized what he understands as a(nother) new turn, that of the apocalyptic:

Composition now faces a somewhat paradoxical turn, one in which the ground ... may be solid but is also corrupted. I am speaking of an apocalyptic turn, in which the end of the world looms ever larger in our disciplinary and pedagogical imagination. Ours is of course not the first generation to worry about the world's end. ... But the field does seem to be thinking more and more about what composition ought to do in the face of serious dangers to human flourishing. A growing list of authors — including Derek Owens, Kurt Spellmeyer, Lynn Worsham, and others — share a basic perspective: economic disruption, endless violence, and, perhaps most important, environmental collapse should force us to reexamine what it means to work in the field of composition, and this reexamination should go to the very heart of what composition means. (458)

Lynch's move here, much like John Trimbur's before him, is to stake a claim on the grounds of synthesis: in this logic, given the work of certain leading scholars all raising similar concerns, we can identify a turn, a shift to something new that provides a provocative and different trajectory than had been anticipated. The intent of a proposal like Lynch's, like Trimbur's before him, is in part to raise (and answer) important questions occupying the center of the field, ones that can help us move forward — and in equal part to write the history of the field as it develops.

John Trimbur's (1994) articulation of the social turn was expressed in a review essay for College Composition and Communication, "Taking the Social Turn: Teaching Writing Post-Process," where he contextualized and reviewed three books relative to the field's history and, more particularly, to the particular historical moment of the review. If we have experienced a social turn, he asks, what precisely is it, and what does it tell us about the field and its theories and practices? As Trimbur's example illustrates, establishing that we are in the midst of a turn, or have experienced a turn, is no small achievement: weaving the work of others into a coherent account that both looks back and looks forward, the writer is able to characterize previous scholarship, theories, and practices, and motivate new work in line with the turn just defined. Put succinctly, the rhetoric of such a turn can change both the forward movement of the field as well as our perception of its progression.

My aim in this chapter is to do likewise: working in a manner somewhat similar to Trimbur's, I trace here what I see as the field's turn to disciplinarity, not, however, based principally on what has already occurred, but rather on what is occurring in the current moment. Of course, what's happening in the current moment of the field is considerable — from continued interest in pedagogy to a resurgence of research into questions of continuing interest to the field (e.g., how students compose) and the development of new research activity (e.g., drawing from archives, analyzing big data). It's also worth noting my own usage here in referring to us as a field. By most accounts we are a field at least; in terms of categorization, it's easier to call ourselves a field precisely because field-ness requires a lower threshold than a discipline does. We might pursue a field of interest without the methodology of a discipline, for example, and of course the two terms are also related, as Kristine Hansen suggests (this volume), to the idea of a profession. My focus here is on the more contentious issue of disciplinarity, my argument that we are making a disciplinary turn, shifting from field to disciplinarity, as four recurring themes collectively demonstrate. Here, then, after providing a brief account of the field's recent history, I more fully analyze the rhetoric of...