ࡱ> c rjbjbSS ,11iA]  8  < 8 N d d d d d d  ,  d d d d d  d d 8 d " d d h4 h hP hd , , ~ Institutionalizing English: Rhetoric on the Boundaries David R. Russell, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011 drrussel@iastate.edu By the 1910s, the discipline of English had emerged as two distinct practices, composition and literature. Composition has always had the most students (and a larger percentage now than ever before); literature has always had the most prestige (all the prestige for several decades, though composition has gained a bit in the last three). Any comprehensive explanation of the professionalization of English as a whole must address the question of composition. Radical historians of the professionBerlin, Ohmann, Miller, Scholes, and otherstend to explain the disciplining of English by looking first outside of the academy, to class, gender, and race, and industrial-economic transformations, to which English responded and in turn helped create. Liberal historians tend to seek the disciplining of English in terms of the English department, as in Graff's account of people talking past each other while all finding shelter under the umbrella of a "humanist myth." While both these stories are useful (and in many ways, complementary), I want to examine disciplining of English into composition and literature by looking in relations English had with other disciplines, both within the new university, in that most defining feature of it, he specialization of disciplinary activity, and, indirectly, beyond the new university, in various social practices with English and its neighboring those disciplines interacted. Composition, I will argue, mediated those interactions in such a way that English was quite successful in its professionalization, but because composition was marginalized in crucial ways, its success was very limited. To get at this middle ground, between English departments and wider social practices or "forces," I conceive of English and the other emerging academic disciplines as specific but intersecting and highly elaborated networks that grew up to be called modern society or corporate capitalism in its institutional relations. In other words, I want to look at what Michael Warner calls homologies between disciplines, with what sociologist Bruno Latour calls a symmetry of explanation, where the same principles of explanation are applied to all phenomena, without privileging one as the explanatory principle (e.g., "nature" as an the explanation of scientific phenomena). Latour analyzes the professions (like other phenomena) as networks of humans and non-humans mediated by various technical mediators (among them inscriptions, tools, machines). Large-scale professionalization is a characteristically modern phenomenon, where the ongoing work of mediation in one network is marked off through the work of purification, the setting up and challenging and maintaining of boundaries with other networks to delineate and defend some object as a profession's legitimate domain. The work of purification, the disciplining of participants to create and maintain always-temporarily stable boundaries, turns the gaze of all away from the quiet, messy, ongoing work of mediation with other networks, through which power is exerted in micro-level interactions, with longer networks (those that enroll more human and non-human resources) tending to dominate. The work I am doing was actually begun others who have sketched the boundary work (Gieryn's term) the discipline of English did in negotiating its professional territory with social practices and disciplines. Elizabeth Wilson has persuasively sketched how the rise of the social sciences restricted the claims of English professors to study civilization in general, and led to a much narrower construction of English's object as 'literature' defined in aesthetic terms and focusingparticularly with the rise of new criticism in the 1930s, on hermeneutics rather than history, with history and culture relegated to 'background.' She also analyzes the retreat of English from the massive the school reform projects of the early twentieth century, where it might also have had a direct influence. Similarly, David Shumway has persuasively argued that English professors failed to gain and exert much control of the network of literary journalism and publishing, out of which many of them came and to which many continued to contribute. Even in first two decades of the twentieth century, when English was solidifying its identity, the publishing industry and the old network of 'men of letters' came to distrust academics. And in the 1920s and beyond, the industry proliferated and diversified to such an extent and in such a variety of media that the standard authors studied by academics became a relatively small part of the industry. Even in disseminating the works of standard authors the publishers did not defer to academics, as the profusion of cheap editions of 'classics' and the conversion of literary journalists to 'reviewers' attest. This paper expands these arguments in the direction of composition to analyze the boundary work English did in relation to some other networks of social activity, particularly other academic disciplines. Those professors who would come to be known as English professors constructed a curricular space for themselves in the highly competitive environment of the nascent modern university, andonly very weakly and indirectly, as it turned outconstructed alliances beyond the university in various other social practices. It was in the university that the profession of English was most successful (and to a lesser extent in secondary schools). English retained a great deal of cultural capital from its association with old networks of power in the Northeast, but its influence on the emerging networks of social practice, in and outside the emerging university, came to be largely indirect as the Brahmin culture (part of what Veysey calls "liberal culture") became itself more and more marginalized in the culture of professionalization. The influence of English as a discipline was mediated not by secure alliances between research in the field or laboratory and application in the clinic or product development laboratory or government agency, as in the sciences and social sciences, but rather by the perceived or presumed educational effects on students who entered other fields besides English. Indeed, the number of English majors declined precipitously in the first decades of professionalization and remained lowwith a brief increase in the 1960suntil today, as English did not (as most other fields did) create secure professional pathways out of academia into other social practices enlisted by the disciplineapart from reproducing itself in higher education and, as Wilson argues, maintaining an ever-diminishing influence over secondary school instruction, even in English. In constructing a definite object of its disciplinary activitywhich eventually came to be termed "literature" or "the canon"professors of rhetoric-becoming-English appropriated a number of tools (some of them discursive) and educational practices from a range of social practices competing for a place in the new American university. They jettisoned others that were their legacy from that set of practices Graff calls the old oratorical curriculum. After sketching rhetoric in the old 19th century sectarian college, I will trace the alliances/appropriations English made in the new secular university with the modern languages, secondary schools, stronger disciplines, weaker disciplines, and networks beyond the educational system. I will take up examples from two very different institutions: Harvard and Iowa State College. The speaking student as object/motive: Rhetoric and its teachers in the old college From the Renaissance humanist revival of classical education to the late nineteenth century, the object of higher educationthe raw material on which the professor and the institution focused their activitywas the speaking (and, to a lesser extent, writing) student. Rhetoric, along with the Latin and Greek languages through which they studied rhetoric, was the center of the curriculum. Rhetoric was typically the only course students took all four yearsand the heart of the extracurriculum also, as we shall see. In America, the oratorical college, as it has been called, was most firmly linked to networks of institutional religion because it prepared and (for many denominations) credentialed young men for the ministry, and to the families of the wealthy, because they sent their sons (often the less promising sons) and a few daughters there as a kind of finishing school before assuming adult responsibilities. The motive of the college was to form the speaking students into "a cast of trained college men, " as Edmund Wilson put it, who would maintain and extend networks of powerful families and institutional religion. However, in the 19th century US, the relation between family networks and power was being renegotiated. Professions began to require a college degree as a credential in the late 1870s, the dawn of the age of professionalization, as Bledstein called it. Positions of leadership were negotiated with children of the old powerful families who did not go to college, and of course with the nouveau riche, whose power came from commercial and industrial networks where, as we shall see, writing was the more powerful mediator than face-to-face spoken interchange that the oratorical college honed. The old college attempted to produce students who were capable of interacting successfully in oral, face-to-face interactions among the powerful family networks (in "literary" discussions) and in public meetings (speeches, debates, sermons) where their power would be exerted, the boundaries drawn. The college acted, officially, in loco parentis, as an extension of the family networks around which privilege was organized and power exerted. The writing demanded of the class was preparation for speaking or, much less frequently, formal communication by letter as an extension of face-to-face interaction (and letters were frequently dictated). In the old college, literature was constructed in the eighteenth-century belle-lettres sense of important texts from any social practice of the upper class, and was a means of forming the speaking and writing student, not the object of the professor's activity, as it would become in the new professional discipline of English. Professors of rhetoric spent most of their working day interacting with students: listening to and critiquing their speaking in recitation and oratorical performances, reading the writing students did to prepare for those performances. Within the old liberal curriculum, students learned to read and speak and write the classical languagesand indirectly their native languagethrough the infamous recitation method, the standard pedagogy for all subjects. Despite its faults, the nineteenth-century classroom was a performance-centered, interactive place by comparison with the modern lecture classroom. The hour was taken up with students speaking, so much so that faculty complained that they had too little time for their own pronouncements. Students also learned through the extracurricular public oratorical performances (rhetoricals) central to the life of the college community--debates, orations, declamations, and so forthand through extracurricular literary societies in which students (often without a professors supervision) read, wrote about, and discussed vernacular literature, as well as politics, religion, and a range of issues. Though recitation, rhetoricals, and performances in literary societies were almost always oral, they necessitated much writingbut as preparation for orally-mediated public speaking, not for specialized inquiry mediated by writing (Halloran). The subjects of rhetorical exercises and teaching, whether in class, in the required rhetorical exercises, or in the literary societies, reflected the whole range of studies in the curriculumno great feat since that range was quite limited, as the networks they would enter were relatively short compared to the extensive scientific, commercial and industrial networks that the new university would soon prepare people to join. Though subjects of student rhetoricals ranged from classical to modern literature, morals, philosophy, grammar, and natural history, they were all drawn from a common public store of knowledge and received ideas, a shared tradition. This was the humanist tradition, and it had to be radically modified to construct the professionalized disciplines of the humanities that evolved in the late 19th century university (for the distinction, see Grafton and Jardine). In the old college, professors of rhetoric typically taught other subjects as well: Latin, Greek, history, logic, moral philosophy, elocution, evidences of Christianityeverything, in short, except the natural sciences, which were never a large part of the old curriculum as they did not play a large part in the activity of the religious and family networks students would enter (Parker, 346). Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek were not primarily taught because they were the languages of international scholarship, but as "mental discipline," at least after the reforms of the 1820s (Rudolph). French was the only "modern language" widely taught (including English)and this was a matter of cultural refinement, not scholarship. There were no departments, since colleges were small, teaching duties among courses shared, and the networks of religion and family students would be a part of were religion and family-network specific (religions and classes did not share a college as disciplines shared universities). Under the influence of the Scottish Enlightenmentnotably through the most influential textbook in 19th century American education, Hugh Blairs Lectures in Rhetoric and Belles Lettresthe criticism of English poems and poetic drama became an important pedagogical technique within early 19th century rhetoric courses. As in the ancient rhetorical tradition, students studied these texts as models of excellent expression (both stylistic and moral) to be imitated in their own speaking, writing, and other kinds of conduct. Beginning in the 1820s, some professors of rhetoric (et al.) began to offer series of lectures on those texts, lectures which aided the students' reading and criticism of vernacular texts in their literary societies (Parker 343). By the 1840s, titles of these professors began to reflect this: e.g., Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature. But these lecture series were never required or sequenced, as were the three or four years of rhetoric courses. And Englishold, middle, or modernwas not taught systematically, as Latin, Greek, and (to a lesser extent) French were. Students were presumed to be able to speak and write their own language, though their rhetoricincluding their elocutionwere the focus of the institutions activity. Boundary work with Rhetoric: What shall we teach (besides students)? Beginning in the late 1870s, a few US colleges experienced a sea change. And the first problem for professors of rhetoric was survival in the new educational economy. They had to construct a disciplinary object and motive in resistance to the old oratorical tradition, which was increasingly discredited in the new secular research university built, in crucial dimensions, on the German model. Specialized faculty in new universities were enlisted in long networks of techno-science ("natural" and "social") that were spreading across the land and around the world. Networks of railroads (and the steel mills to build them), networks of telegraph, telephone, and electrical lines, networks of mass circulation publications and advertising, networks of sewers and vaccinations and settlement houses and other public health works, networks of agricultural extension services reaching across every county, national networks of census statisticians, and so on. The new universities positioned themselves to receive resources and provide resourcespeople and toolsfor these networks, networks far more diverse than the networks of family and religion that the old college had extendedand far longer and thus more powerful, because they enrolled more resources, human and nonhuman. Moreover, the people within the universities who allied themselves with these long networks began to specialize as never before, to professionalize, to purify and officially or even legally mark off their activities from the activities other others, even as their work became more interdependent with the activity networks of others. In Latours terms, the work of purification expanded with the work of mediation. Some colleges became universities on the German model. The modern university that evolved after the civil war specialized knowledge into disciplines to serve and be served by those new longer networks. It divided the organization into discrete departments, split the curriculum into electives and majors, set up programs to train professionals for a wider range of activity networks, and introduced highly specialized graduate education featuring a German import, the Ph.D. Students took specialized sequences of courses, where such rigor was necessary to discipline themand credential themfor specialized roles in the emerging networks of techno-science, as the economy evolved into monopoly/corporate capitalism from the old industrial capitalism. This was crucial in the long networks of techno-science, natural and social, mediated not through oral, face-to-face interaction but by writing at a distance (Kaufer and Carley), where the network has to guarantee the loyalty of its functionaries at a distancethrough written examinations, certificates, schedules, manuals of procedures, etc. (Yates). Moreover, the new university rapidly came to provide methodologically sophisticated (purified) empirical research to serve the new networks, operationalized (mediated) by long strings of short texts (data files) that extended the researchers reach into every corner of human activityresearch that was valued for its potential service to networks of techno-science, with both research and society conceived on the positivist modelthat is to say, the work of purification (Latour). Most importantly for the old rhetoric professors, the new university multiplied the discourse of academic work into myriad arcane disciplinary genresgenres that helped to mediate the activity of networks beyond the ivy covered walls: e.g., the experimental reports and research reviews that were used in "pure" and "applied fields" of industry, government, commerce. And those wider networks made the genres written. JoAnne Yates (1989) has chronicled the transition of American industrial society from oral to written communication. As techno-scientific networks such as railroads spread, oral communication lacked the precision and permanence of written records, the "immutable mobiles" (Latour, "Drawing") that are documents: the schedules, forms, data files, operating procedures, and so on necessary to keep far-flung organizations operating safely (in the case or railroads) and effectivelypowerfully, profitably extending the networks through the lines of rails and wires and files and professionals. Technologies of communication developed apace: the steam-driven rotary press, the linotype, the typewriter, and the most important of all, the vertical file, which allowed much more precise and rapid control through communication through the amassing of long strings of immutable mobiles, to be mobilized rapidly for mobilizing other resources, human and nonhuman. Taylorism and later Fordism performed the work of purification by separating the "mind from the hands" in manufacturing, divorcing professional/management work from labor/machinery, decimating craft organizations and intensifying workers' alienation (and labor uprisings). The structure of the new university posed several thorny barriers to those rhetoric professors looking to hold a place in the transforming institution. Almost of the disciplines (re)constructed the object/motive of their activity around longer networks. Citadels of "pure" science could only exist if there were "applied" fields lying beyond each of them. The ideal of research implied both the work mediation of long networks, their extending beyond the academy (linked primarily by new writing technologies) and simultaneously the work of purification, the separating out of activities and their bracketing, selective ignoring of their deeper mediated relations beyond. The longer the interconnections, the greater the need for specialization, distinctions in functions, boundaries. The specialization (purification) of activityand of written discoursenecessary for extending networks of techno-science meant that rhetoric professors would have to construct an object/motive other than the speaking student. They would have to purify their activity as other disciplines did, to construct a more particular object and move in a direction beyond the oral, face-to-face mediation of religion and family. The object of rhetoric was the systematic study of (oral) communication as it mediated the old networks, those decreasing in power. Rhetoric was discredited. It was called hollow bombasthollow because the official discourse that mattered most was now written, based on the long strings of files stored in offices and bureaus, mediating long (powerful) networks of actions that involved large resources. Writing was what counted, what stored and analyzed and mobilized the data that mediated the long networks. Moreover, in the modern work of purification (on the positivist model), writing was constructed as unproblematic transmission of fully-constructed ("discovered") truths of human and non-human Nature, not a rhetorical process of mediation, of negotiation and persuasion. Rhetoric was equated with bombast and deceit, the opposite of science, of the work of purification. Some rhetoric professors solution to the discrediting of rhetoric was to join in, distancing their object from the object of rhetoric and the old curriculum. Professors of rhetoric-becoming English rejected Isocratic rhetoric for Socratic dialectic, oratory for philosophy, the work of mediation for the work of purification. In an 1885 PMLA article, James Morgan Hart of Cornell, for example, echoed Platos attack on rhetoric in the Gorgias: "To me rhetoric is a purely formal drill . . . Rhetoric always savors to me of the school bench. It is, if we look into it scrutinizingly, little more than verbal jugglery . . . And the less rhetoric here, the betterin my judgment. Rhetorical exercises are, of course, useful. So are the parallel bars and dumb-bells of a gymnasium. Need I push the comparison further?" (Graff & Warner 35) The solutions English evolved to these problems each involved the construction a new activity with a new name. The teaching of rhetoric was gradually reduced four-year course to a one-year course in what came to be called "composition." Composition had to be distanced from rhetoric and, as we shall see, from the new object of "English." To have taken rhetoric (as verbal mediation of a range of social practices) as their object, professors of rhetoric-becoming-English would have had to break the ranks of the new institution and study the work of mediation in all disciplinesand in doing so radically transform the study of rhetoric into a social science. English might have chosen to focus on rhetoric, to study the mediation of texts in society broadly, and adopted sociological methods or created its own. But just as the modern project of purification, the drive toward specialization, made old rhetoric impossible, such a new rhetoric of written, discipline-specific mediation, tied to the new purified practices of the new professions, would have challenged the modernist project of purification that drew lines and ignored the messy work of mediation through which disciplines built their long and powerful networks. Boundary work with Modern Languages: Literary Skill as Composition Faced with an elective curriculum, what were professors of rhetoric-becoming-English to do in the new university? And what was the new university to do with them? The old oral-mediated networks of religion and family were losing power under the pressure of long and powerful networks of professional and industrial and labor and governmental organizations supported by specialized research mediated by the more permanent and mobile genres of written discourse. One answer was to ally themselves with foreign language teachers in their quest to purify their activity. They continued to teach students rhetoric, but in a very altered form, as basic language learning on the analogy of the modern languagesas composition. This separated them from rhetoric in the old college, which was identified with classical languages, and put them firmly on the side of the "modern." Moreover, modern languages, not classical languages, were coming to mediate the scholarly activities of academic disciplines, because those activities were linked to networks of techno-science ("social" and "natural") outside the university. Foreign (written) language teaching become more necessary as networks of techno-science (and the extension of print and transportation networks of which they were a part) made international travel and communication necessary to professional work. French science was the first to professionalize and publish systematically in a range of fields. US academics traveled Germany to study science, and foreign modern languages became necessary to professional workthat is, in French and German, the languages of people constructing long networks of techno-science. At his welcoming address to the first MLA convention in 1883, the President Barnard of Columbia, a chemist by training, expressed "his full sympathy with the object of the meeting," lamenting that in his old college (Yale 28) he "had no instruction in the subjects presented at the convention" and was "painfully alone in the two languages, French and German, necessary to unlock the books his profession required him to know" (Watts 139). Written communication also became necessary in ways it never was when the networks were shorter and less strongly-aligned (less mediated by immutable mobiles)and for many of the same reasons foreign language study did: to mediate the long purified professional networks necessary to construct far-flung networks of machines and other tools, to create industrial society. The emerging American university appropriated the genres of German scholarship (thesis, dissertation, scholarly article) and of commerce, the memorandum (or memorial), proposal, and report. In the late 1860s, a few faculty members, particularly in the sciences, began requiring students to write extended "course theses," which increasingly bore the marks of modern, text-based scholarship. In the 1860s, those ranged from fifteen to ninety handwritten pages--much longer than the required rhetorical exercises and too long to be easily read aloud to a group. They often contained such scholarly apparatus as a table of contents at the beginning and a brief bibliography at the end. More importantly, they addressed questions of interest to a discipline rather than to the "general educated public" (as it was being constructed by the new mass media), though they rarely involve a critical reading of sources or original arguments (Russell 80-82). In 1870, when Harvard introduced the elective curriculum, the catalog first announced that "in all departments special investigations may be exacted," indicating that individual faculty could require written work beyond the required rhetorical exercises. By the late 1870s, original student investigation and written critical analysis of documents had begun to be accepted as a matter of courseeach specialized course (Russell 80-82). At Iowa State College in 1876, course theses and undergraduate dissertations were first required in the disciplines (Russell 82-83). In this new environment, the first problem was to get curricular space. Courses in English literature in the old college were few and rarely required. Courses in Latin, Greek, and rhetoric were almost universally required, often all four years. Many professors of modern languages (English now included) began a frontal assault on their chief rival, the classical languages, and the course most closely associated with them, rhetoric. As A. N. Hunt put it in 1878, "The question is, will the classics as taught in our colleges make any concessions of their large amount of time to the modern languages appealing for such time? More will they make such a concession to the English? We are within the department of language and literature. In that department, the place of English has been almost a cipher. The ancient languages have had the field. English now applies for more space in the department--for its rightful place" (Graff & Warner 41). Hunt goes on to say that the science faculty were more welcoming to English than the classics faculty, who were "patronizing and cynical." The science faculty needed written French, Germanand new written genres in English, particularly the 'research paper,' which become a staple of the new composition courses. That contrast in attitudes defines the difference between the old and new regimes, and suggests both a central problem and eventual opportunity for disciplining English. In the old oratorical curriculum, Latin and Greek were the accomplishments of a scholar, while English was merely the mother tongue, learned from childhood in its oral form. Students were simply assumed to be interested in the literature of their own languagean expectation largely borne out by students' interest in the literary societies. So there was apparently no need to teach English literature systematically at the university level, no need for specialists. Proponents of English as a discipline had to answer the frequently-leveled charge that "any body can teach English" (Graff 67-68). The sciences, on the other hand, saw English (and German and French) as the medium through which the carried on their workin writing. A professional need appeared. At the first MLA meeting in 1883, English professors were outnumbered by those in foreign language three to one (Watts 139). Professors of rhetoric-becoming-English were allying with a stronger network. Just as the "foreign fencing master and dancing teacher," as one professor of French lamented at the first MLA meeting, was the enemy of the foreign language teacher, because he taught an unprofessionalized, oral French, so the elocution teacher and rhetoric professor were the enemies of English, because they taught an oral, unprofessionalized approach to English (Watts 140) Early rationales for English emphasize not literature as the study of certain specific kinds of texts (reception) but rather writing (production). At its inception, Michael Warner points out, "The MLA . . . was not primarily, either in intent or in membership, a literary organization." The members "had in most cases begun their academic careers with little or no interest in teaching literature," and "thought of literary texts as pedagogical tools." (Warner in Graff 68). The first meeting almost exclusively pedagogical. The main order of business: "requirements and admonitions; teaching methods; raising the standard of the studies"keys to finding a secure place in the new university (Watts 141). But of course since all the students already knew their mother tongue, the definition of knowing English had to change. The questions was, how could knowing English be redefined and its professors become its arbiter to mark out professional boundaries? By answering this question, professors of rhetoric-becoming-English met the first requirement of professionalization, to claim expertise in solving some perceived social problem and become recognized as the arbiter of the solutions. Constructing the Disciplinary Object and Motive: "Literary Skill" What then would it mean to teach the English language, the mother tongue, as a modern language at the university level? The emphasis would be on written discourse, not the oral language of the old curriculum, and, more importantly, English study and teaching would have to deal with the problem of specialized written academic and professional discourse, the long powerful networks with which the university affiliated. Professors of rhetoric-becoming-English had to carve out a professional space by constructing some specific phenomenon as a social problema problem that could not be solved easily or finally (creating an ongoing need for professional services), and one that others could not or would not want to solve (forestalling competition). Initially that phenomenon was the "writing of the mother tongue" or "literary skill." In 1873, ten years before the MLA was founded and, significantly, the same year the university was organized into departments (Graff 66), Harvard president Charles Eliot appointed to the newly-formed English department faculty a journalist, Adams Sherman Hill, to "familiarize the pupil with the principles that underlie good composition" (Hill, Briggs, and Hurlbut 17). Hill and others embarked on a campaign to show that traditionally-educated people were "illiterate" in their mother tongue. In "The Cry for More English" and other articles in the popular press, Hill, the chief architect of composition and the English department at Harvard, wrote, "So long as people think literary skill easy of acquisition, they will be unwilling to have their children spend time in acquiring an accurate and refined use of the mother tongue" (Hill "Answer" 234). The "average graduate . . . can do almost anything else better than express his ideas in clear, vigorous and elegant English" (Hunt qtd. in Graff & Warner 39). For pedagogical reformers like Eliot and Hill, rhetoricfor centuries the center of the old curriculumrepresented all that was bad in higher education: it stifled student interest through dry recitation and meaningless, formulaic speeches on "vague generalities," while the students wrote English no better (or even worse) than before. Hill responded approvingly to the criticisms of student writing that had begun to appear in the popular press of 1870smany of them (like his own) written by professors. "Within a short time, people have opened their eyes to the defects of a system which crams without training, which spends its strength on the petty or the useless, and neglects that without which knowledge is but sounding brass and tinkling cymbal" (34). The reformers stressed a practical and elementary knowledge of the written "mother tongue." Students must learn to write "a simple English sentence" before opening a Latin grammar, they argued (Hill in Brereton *). The nascent departments of English strove to put a general-composition course in the freshman year (before, not after, Latin and Greek). Writing was viewed primarily as an elementary skill (as it had been in the dominantly oral university). Writing amounted to correct transcription of fully formed thought or speech, not the process of engagement with some specific social practice, not communication with readers who had specialized knowledge, not rhetorical. The oral emphasis of the old college was beginning to fade as writing became dominant, but it left in its wake "the opinion that 'reading and writing' can or should be completely mastered before the main business of education begins," as Susan Miller says (65). In constructing "literary skill" as something to be learned and taught by professional specialists in English, professors set themselves up in the business of being arbiters and teachers of writing per se. But of all the many subjects available in the new university and in the wider culture, all the many kinds of discourse in the mother tongue, which should students write in English courses? And how would professors of English know students had mastered "practical" writing? "Literary skill," was left very ambiguous. For a time, the assumption was that it included both performance and reception, writing and reading, in any social practice. But the territory they claimed was vasttoo vast, as it turned out. Only later would the distinction between literacy and literature come into play, and it was always a distinction that had a variety of uses, as we shall see. Because writing mediates many social practices, professors of rhetoric-becoming-English, in responding to the internal contradictions of the emerging institution, had to choose which social practices they would focus on, which genres and uses of writing. Though they might have chosen to go the route of social science, a route that some elements of English studies would choose in the 1980s, they chose a physical object, a discrete set of texts, whose formal properties they would study. They purified their object, changing it from the messiness of students speaking and writing in socially-mediated activities of many kinds, to the to the "pure" study of texts in the realm of ideas (Miller). Students would come to read a limited canon of texts, primarily, and write about those texts and their personal experience, but that answer was slow to evolve in the competitive disciplinary environment of the new university. Boundary work with Secondary Schools ad University Administrators The first and crucial action in purifying the disciplinary object of English was the institution of entrance examinations, enlisting university administrators and secondary school teachers in their nacient professional network. Professors of rhetoric-becoming-English finessed the problem of specialization by making defining writing in general terms as grammatical and mechanical correctness. In 1873-74, the year after the Harvard English department was organized, a separate written exam in "English" was first required. Before 1873, the Harvard examination only required oral reading of passages from such authors as Shakespeare and Milton, familiar as oral declamation memory pieces. On the new exam, grammatical and mechanical correctness was the only criterion mentioned for its evaluation. The year after the written English entrance examination was given, the Harvard catalog warns: "Correct spelling, punctuation, and expression, as well as legible handwriting, are expected of all candidates for admission." Professors of English could not claim to be arbiters of the specialized rhetoric used in all disciplines, the many strategies of argument, criteria of evidence, and other conventions of discourse proliferating in the new disciplines. But they could claim a copy editor's expertise (Hill was a journalist). The purification of disciplinary activities forced professors of rhetoric-becoming-English to choose what kinds of writing the English department had the authority to judge, to set boundaries to the ubiquitous mediation of writing in the powerful new networks being constructed. On that first entrance examination, students were required to write on the "works of standard authors," which became the object of the student's study for preparing and writing the entrance exam in English (Graff 44 quoting Applebee). The activity changed fundamentally. It was no longer oral performance of works of standard authors for the enjoyment or edification of a non-specialist audiencerhetoric or elocution; it was transformed into writing texts as interpretation of works of standard authors for specialists in those authors' worksliterary history or criticism. In this, the professors enlisted, through the force of university entrance exams, the secondary teachers and students in their network of activity. To prepare their students for the entrance exams, secondary teachers had to focus on a canon of exam prompts/literary texts. In approving the examination, university administrators tacitly acknowledged that the writing that counted was writing about a list of "standard" authors. Very shortly, that canon of standard authors examined would be come the object examined in English research as well as teaching and assessment. And writing about the authors examined would become the primary activity of professors as well as students. Like the natural sciences, English chose a discrete material object, one that could be collected into a standard edition or anthology (if not a test tube) and studied minutely. To purify its activity, English claimed as its object textsbut not all texts, only a relatively small set of texts not already claimed by others (e.g., history or philosophy or science). Literary skill became the valuing of "literature," and the marked term in English, the "literary skill" they possessed and taught, became "literature," not literacy. Yet the nacient composition courses also allowed many professors of rhetoric-becoming-English to retain alliances in the old networks of wealthy families, which the old college had served. As Shumway has argued, many professors of rhetoric-becoming-English were integral parts of a network of literary magazine and book publishing, particularly the strongest network centered in the Northeast where the most prestigious of the new universities were located. As that network expanded its influence through the growth of the publishing industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, refinement and taste came to be associated with standard authors as well and commodified in hundreds of cheap editions of standard authors. Reading and writing and speaking about "standard" authors (in "standard" English) mediated entrance into not only higher education, through entrance examination, but entrance into managerial and other positions of power in networks of economic power also centered in the Northeast. And it was professors in English departments who would define the standard, as their professional role and domain. That association, within one disciplinary territory, of written correctness and canonical texts, created through entrance examinations, allowed English to create a very flexible disciplinary object and ambiguous motive, which could serve a variety of institutional ends. As Wallace Douglas and other historians of composition have argued, this solution justified selection on elitist grounds without sounding elitist. Eliot wrote in 1879, "I may as well abruptly avow, as a result of my reading and observation in the matters of education, that I recognized but one mental acquisition as an essential part of the education of a lady or a gentleman--namely, an accurate and refined use of the mother tongue" (37). If "refined use of the mother tongue" is an elementary skill to be learned in a course taught by specialists, not the result of years of socialization in a discipline, then excluding students from the higher education on that basis was considered perfectly appropriate. Students should presumably have learned it in secondary school. And if they hadn't then they were not college material--though the might be made so by English professors, or the lower-status composition instructors whom they enlisted in their public service of scouring writing for errors. Composition became remedial, and took over one function of the old and discredited oratorical curriculum: teaching social refinement, but refinement constructed as an elementary technique, proper writing, not a disciplinary object. Indeed, writing 'hospitals' or 'clinics' or 'laboratories' were created around the turn of the century in high school and university English departments, to provide a cure for poor writing, which had now been constructed in terms that resembled public health campaigns, but it was errors that would be cleaned up, scrubbed from student papers with red ink. In 1894 a national "Committee of 10," headed by Eliot, issued its profoundly influential report, which formulated the US secondary school English curriculum. It required English for all four high school years for all students, with two goals: composition training and literary appreciation. Though the Committee of 10 insisted the two should "never be dissociated in the mind of the teacher and their mutual dependence should be constantly present to the mind of the pupils," literature came to be dominant in the schools, though never as thoroughly as in the universities. As Ohmann has forcefully argued (Politics 26-41), despite the efforts of many secondary school and freshman composition teachers to help students from immigrant and working class families write 'correctly,' the emerging discipline did not turn its energies improving the teaching of writing and did not need to. Composition as correctnessenforceable, countableallowed for sorting, particularly with the advent of national testing mechanisms such as the College Entrance Examination Board in 1901. Proofreading became proof of fitness to enter the managerial class. Boundary work with stronger disciplines: The forensic system What then would "literary skill" mean for university students, all of whom had been taught elementary reading and writing in primary school, and had indeed often had to pass entrance examinations that demonstrated that? In the last decades of the 19th century, other disciplines expected English professors would prepare students to write in their disciplines. The transition from the speaking and writing student to a canon of texts as disciplinary object was gradual. Professors of rhetoric continued to take responsibility for improving students speaking and writing through a written version of the old rhetoricals. For a time, professors of rhetoric-becoming-English supervised students in the writing (and sometimes oral presentation of) texts on subjects from across the new elective curriculum. In fact, the reformers originally saw the freshman composition course as merely the beginning of a four-year program for developing students' writing in the disciplines, a program that retained the essential shape of the traditional rhetorical training. As Hill wrote in a memo to Eliot outlining a four-year interdisciplinary "Forensics" program to develop students' writing, supervised by the English department, "Gradually [the student] should be led from the skillful use of materials provided by others to the discovery and arrangement of materials for himself, from the practice of clothing another's thoughts in his own language to the presentation of his own thoughts or fancies in appropriate language" (Russell 51). To accomplish this goal, Harvard and many other universities tried for three decades to adapt the old practice of required rhetoricals to the demands of the new university, with its elective curriculum and departmentalized written knowledge. That is, professors of rhetoric-becoming-English briefly held on to their old motive and object: improving students discourse production in powerful social networks. During the 1870s, Harvard students attended lectures and recitation on rhetoric in the last three years (freshmen took elocution), but the catalog also specifically prescribed "themes once every four weeks" for sophomores, "once every three weeks" for juniors, and "four forensics" for seniors (Russell 52). But the transition from oral to written requirements was not easy to make, for the new university was no longer a single discourse community with a single curriculum. In 1873, the year Harvard was organized into departments, senior "honors" candidates were allowed to "substitute for these Forensics an equal number of Theses in their special departments, provided such substitution is permitted by the professors in those departments" (Russell 52). This provision reflects the growing tendency of departmental faculty to assign extended writing in elective courses--"course theses," as they were called, or what came to be called "term papers" or "research papers" in the early twentieth century. In 1878, Harvard dropped the junior and senior rhetoric courses (leaving sophomore rhetoric the only composition course) and instead prescribed "certain written exercises only." Significantly, these themes and forensics were supervised by a professor of philosophy (George Herbert Palmer) and a professor of Christian morals (Francis Greenwood Peabody); English faculty still continued to teach sophomore rhetoric. In 1883, faculty from other disciplines were again called in: LeBaron Briggs from Greek for sophomore themes (a future dean), and Josiah Royce from philosophy for junior and senior forensics. Eliot commissioned Royce to collect 250 topics "with the cooperation of instructors in nearly all departments" from which students were to choose and write only two forensics (Russell 54). In 1885, when the sophomore rhetoric course was moved to the freshman year and dubbed English A, Freshman English, the upper level writing requirements continued. But despite Harvard's use of faculty from several disciplines to supervise and grade English B and C papers, faculty could not teach, evaluate, or, in some cases, even understand the arguments of students from so many specialized disciplines, each with its own vocabulary, issues, and conventions, its own criteria for evaluating evidence and arguments. In the late 1890s, writing requirements were reduced and, more importantly, the students could substitute "written work done in an elective course" or a senior honors thesis for the required themes and forensics. In 1900, Harvard dropped the forensic system, substituting instead three remedial courses for students who did poorly in English A. The familiar 20th century pattern became firmly entrenched: freshman composition for all and additional remedial courses for some, augmented by research papers at the discretion of individual faculty, with no formal mechanisms for teaching, revision, or for evaluation of writing beyond the specific course (Russell 55). Similarly, English departments at many public universities responded to the demands of other disciplines that they organize efforts to improve students' specialized writing in other disciplines. For example, Iowa State College, a Midwestern, land-grant, agricultural and mechanical college, had from its opening in 1869 required all students (in addition to a freshman course called, "Applied Rhetoric") to deliver original orations before weekly college assemblies, supervised by the professor of rhetoric as part of his regular duties. In 1879, Iowa State began requiring seniors to write a "graduating thesis," "supervised by the Professor giving instruction in the branch of learning upon which it treats, and . . . responsible to the Faculty for its supervision and correction." That same year, the college also required juniors and seniors to write four "dissertations" (brief research papers) "upon topics embraced in the studies they are pursuing, and approved by the professors and Faculties having charge of such studies. The professor shall have entire supervision of the dissertation so written, being sole judge of its fitness for reading and shall report its completion to the President." The focus had begun to shift to writing, and each disciplinary community, not the whole community, set the standards for writing. A year later, the dissertation requirement was quietly dropped, and English literature was required of all juniors. The graduation thesis was retained in most departments well into the 20th century, but the English department had nothing to do with it. Thus, students were left without any college-mandated training in writing beyond the freshman year (Russell 59-60). Professors of rhetoric-becoming-English could not teach all discourse that counted, as rhetoric professors did in the old college, even had they wished to become servants of other disciplines (which they did not). The compartmentalized, additive structure of the modern university, with its specialized disciplinary communities separated by written discourse, had outgrown the forensic system it inherited from the oral, face-to-face community of the old college. The disciplinary/professional networks were too long and too numerous. To teach English as production (writing) would have to mean either teaching it an elementary level, as surface correctness, proofreadingor vastly broadening the activity of teaching "literary skill" to studying and teaching writing as a social phenomenon, how texts mediate social practices. But the work of mediation was precisely what the modern universitys drive toward the purification of specialized disciplines submerged. Charles H. Grandgent, reminiscing in 1930, suggested that Harvard had dropped the required upper-level themes and forensics because, "like other things outlived, they were made superfluous by the great amount of writing called for in the various courses. Indeed, there was (and perhaps is) cause to fear that constant scribbling may do more harm than good" (Russell 88). However, students need for help in manipulating writing, this crucial mediator of activity in all the new disciplines, had not faded but increased. Yet the new missions of research, graduate teaching, and scientific and professional instruction drew resources away from the central task of the old college: undergraduate teaching in the liberal arts, centered on oral rhetoric. The elective curriculum and departmental organization made a specific place for composition courses where there had been none before and writing became one more subject among many, it ceased being a central part of all of them. Here was a central contradiction in the disciplining of English. In order for students to learn the discourse of the specialized networks, the discourse of each specialty had to be taught by the specialists. There was no way to purify the very messy network of written mediation, to blackbox and teach a formula for effective communication, in an environment where disciplines, including English, were ignoring the messy mediators in an attempt to purify their activity. Whether in the scientific positivists emphasis on "facts" and "laws," or the humanist idealist emphasis on universal truths, the writing of students and professionals in their daily work was officially ignored, and students' development as writers of specialized discourse folded quietly into their training. There were pious pronouncements from administrators and, at times, from overworked rhetoric-becoming-English faculty, that "every teacher must be an English teacher" in order to for students to learn "to write." Yet in order for English teachers to have institutional and social credit, they had to claim teaching students "to write" as their professional expertise. Official responsibility for improving students' writing gradually shifted to the English department, but it was relegated to elementary, low-status courses emphasizing correctness, because that was all English could teach about writing, given the specialization of discourse, the modern drive toward purification, and the lack of a discipline to study the differences in written rhetoric. All professors are and are not composition teachers. English professors are and are not composition teachers. By constructing under one covering term, English, two new and largely separate activities, each with new motivesthe study of literature as a canon of texts, and the teaching of composition as an elementary skillEnglish departments harnessed and then gradually submerged the contradiction. A cycle of blame for poor student writing set in, with everyone and no-one responsible for it. Faculty in other disciplines could blame the English department. To faculty in other disciplines who complained that their students could not write well, English professors could blame admissions standards or high school teachers, neither of whom were controlled by English professors, or argue that they taught on elementary composition, which needed to be developed and reinforced by faculty in other departments. As early as 1879, Hill complained that the new university professor, "absorbed in his specialty, contented himself with requiring at recitations and examinations knowledge of the subject-matter, however ill-digested and ill-expressed," and thus could not be relied on to improve students' writing (Russell 63). In the economy of the new university, composition lacked disciplinary or departmental statusand thus lacked the wherewithal to compete for resources to enact meaningful department-wide or university-wide reforms. Faculty in the disciplines (including English), competing for excellence in specialized research and teaching ever-larger numbers of students, did not have the time or support to focus on writing development, and writing was so embedded in the professional activities of their disciplinary communities that it was largely transparent, and difficult to reconceptualize as something more than an elementary transcription skill. The mediation of writing seemed to disappear as the purification of disciplinary truths became the goal. And the new English departments, purifying their own specialized research agendas, rarely had the means or the will to push successfully for college-wide writing requirements. There was no place in the play of purified specializations for a discipline that took as its object the writing (student) in any social practice, any network of activity. Not until the emergence of the writing-across-the-curriculum movement in the late 1970s would writing and rhetoric in a wide range of social practices be constructed as an object of disciplinary inquiry, though only very marginally associated with English departments. Boundary work with weaker disciplines: Consolidating gains , handling rebellions Before the disciplinary object of a literary canon became more or less stabilized in the 1890s, with literary history (later "criticism") as the method and motive, teachers of rhetoric-becoming-English established alliances with other weak social practices (those not tied to long networks) to gain a place. Initially, there was no firm sense that English would be a separate department. In the booming economy of the new university, all sorts of departments evolved from the late 1870s to deal with the specialization of students into a range of professionalizing networks in many social practices. Some professors of rhetoric gave up the teaching of rhetoric for the emerging specializations that would come to be called "the humanities": history, philosophy, theology, classics, and modern languages other than English, which were all professionalizing. Many technical universities or small universities formed grab-bag units to house composition courses, primarily, and other less populated courses in the humanities. At Iowa State College and MIT, for example, teachers of rhetoric-becoming-English and their courses were in the same unit as history, political science, elocution, modern languages, and so on. Where specific English departments emerged, professors of rhetoric-becoming-English formed alliances with professors pursuing a wide range of social practices to build a longer and more powerful network within and beyond the institution and guarantee a place. In the late 19th and early 20th century, English departments appropriated a great variety of courses linked to various social practices: philology (and later linguistics), journalism, theater, oratory and elocution, creative writing, technical writing, and business writing. (Parker 348; Miller; Adams). A single faculty member often taught several of these courses, as high school teachers do today, according to his or her interests and the demand for courses from students, administrators, and professionals outside the institution. Such alliances made the English department stronger in the sense that the department offered more courses, had more faculty andcrucial to the new orderallied itself with networks of social practices growing in size and power. Journalism, for example, was becoming a national network through mass circulation publications, wire services, and large networks of correspondents. Yet in order to achieve a firm identity in the new institution, to construct a secure and high-status place in the new educational order, professors of rhetoric who wished to cement the place of a canon of literature as disciplinary object had to give up the study of a range of texts and the activities they mediated, drawn from various social practices, and delimit the object of its activity, purify their own network, their field of knowledge. They could not be professors of everything to do with communication and still increase their academic status. They had, in other words, to appropriate the ideal of methodologically rigorous research on some specific disciplinary object, some raw material, some problem space. The literary canon allowed this. As the study of a literary canon in historical terms found a secure place in the university, supported by an economic base of composition constructed as elementary skills, the teaching of other kinds of production left the English department or were marginalized, like composition, as service courses, without systematic programs of research to support them as disciplinary objects (though at many small colleges and historically black colleges, they remain part of English departments). Faculty who wished to pursue one of these other objects, to affiliate with other social practices, often formed or joined new departments or schools. In the 1910s and 1920s there was a series of rebellionssometimes quite bitteras professors with other objects and motives seceded from English and formed their own professional organizations. Those interested in pedagogy left in 1912 to form the National Council of Teachers of English, which quickly focused on high school teachers and is now the largest professional organization of teachers in any discipline (Stewart). Debate, oratory, and elocution formed their own departments after a dramatic break with English in 1914 to form departments of speech. Theater allied with departments of speech or fine arts, beginning in the 1920s. Journalism, first housed in English departments and taught by English professors, left English to construct its own departments and schools, with the professional association forming in 1917. Some philologists allied themselves with classics departments and joined the American Philological Association, while others allied with linguistics, which formed a professional association in 1924, and the teaching of English as a second language professionalized as applied linguistics in the 1930s. In all of these moves, English ceded, in part, teaching and research in the production and circulation of texts, the work of textual mediation, to other social practices, retaining only a purified study of reception. Reading was divorced from speaking and writing, and the reading limited to the canon. Specialized, upper level writing courses were gradually dropped (Miller) or, in the case of business and technical writing, given over to other departments or marginalized, like composition, as "service" courses. Technical and business writing courses were taught from the late 19th century and continue today to be studied and taught in some English departments, though also in business and engineering schools. Indeed, in the1930s some engineering collegesoften within state universities (e.g., Michigan, Washington)founded their own separate English departments because they wished to give their students a broader approach to the study of texts than the methods of English departments allowed. The professional association for technical writing dates also from the 1910s. Even the production of "creative writing" (constructed into another category than "literature" as object of English) was separated from its reception (few courses were offered in Creating and Criticizing the Novel). Creative writing was given a secure if marginal place in English departments in the 1940s, with the creation of MFA programs (appropriating the category from the fine arts, not the humanities). Academic creative writers formed a professional association in the 1960s. Constructing Internal Boundaries: Literature as the object of disciplinary activity The new object, then, gradually came to be literaturenot all literature read in the academy, as in the old-college sense of belles letters, the best writing of any social practice of the upper classbut literature constructed as discrete canon of certain kinds of texts, arranged chronologically on the model of history, which many professors of rhetoric-becoming-English had taught (and universities had come to use to on entrance exams). This allowed the embryonic discipline to have what other powerful disciplines had: a pure (material) object of study, isolatable (anthologized) on a table (the famous "five foot shelf"), probed in a laboratory (as English professors sometimes described their seminar rooms in the 1890s) using (critical) apparatus surrounding them to do the probing. At the 1885 MLA, Professor John McElroy of Pennsylvania claimed, "Today English is no longer, as it once was, every modern subject of the course except itself"a boast English gradually made good on over several decades (Parker 348). Though many rhetoric-turned-English professors attacked the "empiric" of science, the disciplining of English had to carry on a similar purification around a method to claim high status. German idealism and later formalism served to purify the disciplinary object of professors of rhetoric-becoming-English, as British empiricism and Comteian positivism did for the sciences, natural and social. Yet appropriation of the research ideal was problematic for English because it did not construct long networks of influence in the society, as the sciences did. The publishing industry did not formally recognize the expertise of literary critics as, for example, engineers did the expertise of physicists and chemists. Indeed, the 'canon' became an ever-smaller percentage of the book market. English did not enroll government officials in its activity as economists and sociologists came to do in theirs. Because English had constructed a very limited object, a canon of texts, and broken with those stronger and weaker potential allies who were interested in production and distribution of discourse, it lacked an applied field to carry on the work of mediation to extend its activity network. Yet the emerging discipline gradually appropriated a distinction from the sciences between pure and applied dimensions of its activity, between an elementary and general teaching of writing as composition (rather than as a mediator of professional activity in a range of social practices) and an advanced and purified study of writing as literature, a specialist knowledge and discourse on a well-defined object: "works of standard authors." It was composition that allowed English to separate itself from other disciplines and, indeed, to purify itself of relations with wider social practices in their gritty work of mediation in longer networks, to stand on the outside. Composition was a separable, generalizable skill, which students could or should learn in a year-long course and were assumed to be able to apply to any field in which they were required to write, regardless of "content." There was thus no need to tread on other disciplines' turf when helping students with their writing. Yet it served a perceived social need: writing improvement. And it brought social credit. To improve one's writing one went to English teachers. Reading was the pure field (purification), writing the applied field (mediation). Composition was constructed in accordance with the Cartesian dualities of the new institutional order. It was a "skill," not "knowledge." Students were not authors and their writing not literature. Composition was a lower level skill, unworthy of high-status university professors, merely practical, as physics and chemistry distanced themselves from engineering, biology from agriculture, sociology from social work. Unlike rhetoric courses in the old college, which combined reading and writing, production and reception, with production the privileged category, "composition" courses came to be separated from "literature" courses in the curriculum. Composition was first called "practical" or "practical rhetoric" to distance it from the rhetorical training associated with the teaching of Latin and Greek. Later it was called practical to distance it from the study of the canon (Graff & Warner 56). At Indiana in 1885, for example, the work in composition was described as being "as completely practical as we can make it. Writing is learned by writing papers, each one of which is corrected and rewritten. There are no recitations in rhetoric" (qtd. in Graff & Warner 51). Writing training in the new university was not tied to rhetorical theory or to a range of social practices. The growing use of personal assignments in general-composition courses divorced composition from other powerful social practices by turning students away from their other pursuits and isolating their activity on the personal, the individual, stripped of connection with other social practices, political, economic, disciplinary. Students need not cite, need not connect their words to those of any powerful social practice beyond "English." Writing was not part of the process of learning a subject but rather a separate accomplishment, independent of content. It was one course among many, albeit an important one. As many English professors insisted, students in composition must learn how to write about "what they know" before proceeding to write about what others know (Connors). Like other applied fields, composition, with its "merely practical" object, the writing student, was constructed as unworthy of serious research by those in the pure field. In this split, rhetoric became the unmarked term the construction of "literary skill." Composition, seen as an applied activity, had much lower status in emerging departments of English, and, consequently, was often taught by graduate students and part-time faculty--mainly women (Stewart). The work of purification proceeded through the establishment of hierarchies in a complex division of labor (as it did in the sciences through the separation of "bench" scientists from "scientists," "applied science" from "science," "teaching" from "science," "clinical practice" from "research." In 1876, three years after composition courses were instituted at Harvard, Francis James Child, the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric, got an offer from Johns Hopkins (see Parker 347). As a condition of remaining at Harvard, he asked for and was granted relieved of his duties for teaching English composition and was named the first professor of English Literature at Harvard. Part-time or adjust faultyusually womenwere hired to teach sections of composition course, "Section hands," as they were sometimes called. By 1903, the MLA had disbanded its pedagogical section, which had been dominated by professors interested in composition and rhetoric (Stewart). Literary skill was now defined very differently than at the first MLA, when the agenda was pedagogical, focused on the teaching of modern languages to students. As Shumway and others have argued, literature had come to be defined "as a very narrow canon of texts and authors, and that canon was discussed in terms of a relatively few issues that arose out of a thoroughly positivist set of assumptions about knowledge and romantic assumptions about authorship" (100). By the 1910s, English faculty seriously questioned whether the teaching of composition was compatible with their professional role in the new universities, and many called for its abolition. In 1915 Edward A. Thurber, an English professor complaining of the burden of composition, wrote, The department of English is straining to become a forum of discussion of all questions that have assailed human intelligence. . . . Those instructors of English [who teach composition] are asked to become actively conversant with science, politics, philosophy. Though still devotees of belles lettres, they are also striving to speak with authority on every other subject. . . . Frankly the assumption is startling. May not a cog have slipped somewhere? (17) As the cog metaphor suggests, there was no place in the organizational machinery oiled by a positivist version of disciplinary specialization for a course (or a discipline) that took as its province all discoursethe work of mediation, not purification. Yet the abolition movement made little headway. Other departments insisted that composition be taught, and English departments depended on composition for its economic base. The solution most adopted was to teach composition and literature in combination. That is, students wrote about literature, on the model of literary historical research and, later, the hermeneutic close reading of New Criticism. The founding assumptions of English studies, that writing is an autonomous set of skills applicable to any genre, and standard authors provide the ideal reading experience, provided a cogent rationale for making composition courses lectures (later discussion) of canonical texts supplemented by some grammar review and the correction of faults in student papersthe dominant pedagogy in composition until at least the 1970s (Brereton 16). Departments that did not accept the assumption and complained that the curriculum was narrow were often allowed to form their own writing courses (as with Engineering and Business, at some institutions, as I noted above). As in the sciences, English tacitly socialized its students to write its genres of professional work but without much explicit, systematic instruction in writing those genres: the literary appreciation or analysis. Even with the New Critical emphasis on explication de texte, the emphasis was on a great author's literary techniques, not on the students' rhetorical development. Literature, like the sciences, saw no need to study the writing development of students, only to teach the purified object, without focusing on the messy work of mediation. Graff explains a lack of coherence in the literature curriculum and a lack of intellectual community in English departments to the field coverage principle (110-13). But the field coverage principle is only one manifestation of the university-wide work of purificationand the denial of the work of mediation, including writing, that created the modern university. The divides among professors of English are manifest most strongly in the deeper divide between composition and literature, between the production and reception of texts. The idealistic jeremiads (Graff 113) of the MLA against science and materialistic culture, which Graff rightly notes were hollow "Sunday truths" to be forgotten, were the counterpart of the scientists and social scientists calls for a reform of society on positivist principles. All disciplines, not only English, had cultivated a "narrow professionalism" to which "breadth of culture" had "been frequently sacrificed." (qtd. in Graff 118). What made the jeremiads of the MLA particularly hollow was that, daunted by the rise of specialization, of long and powerful "purified" networks, they were, even more than the sciences, in the process of constructing their "applied" field in a very narrow way and constructed a relatively short network of alliances, extending only to first-year writing courses. In doing so, they had largely given up direct relation to other networks of social activity in ignoring the study of writing in society and redefining literary skill in terms of canonical authors instead of students (and the professionals their students at all levels would become) writing in a range of social practices. That English was successful in its professionalization despite this attests to the power of the contradiction in "literary skill" to capitalize on the social credit of the standard of written correctness and the standard authors it had constructed and mobilized within the institution and, in increasingly indirect ways, beyond it. Boundary work with networks beyond the university: Specialization of activity and the ideal of service As English narrowed its boundaries by ceding to others a research interest in the production of discourse in social practices beyond literary (canon) study, required composition allowed the discipline to construct a network of influence, albeit a comparatively short one, and do other boundary work besides staving off the arguments of the old oratorical tradition. It provided a form of social credit within and beyond the university that literature lacked in comparison with other disciplines directly based on producing useful tools "applied to" (mediating) long (powerful) networks of techno-science, natural and social. Most disciplines could point to social benefits through the mediators (technologies) their networks constructed or, to phrase it in their terms, the truths they discovered. English could at least point to composition, to the valuable service of teaching students to write, and therefore claim the social (and financial) benefits of providing this professional service. Writing was constructed from the 1870s as an institutional and social problem that English departments would address. Yet because composition was constructed as "remedial"teaching students a skill that should have learned in secondary school or before and not developing involvement with social practices that used written discoursesEnglish, like high-status scientific and social scientific disciplines, could separate its own high-status, purified, study (reception) from its low-status teaching (production), the "service" course of composition. This was work that other departments did not wish to take on. Indeed, their own work of purification (and their high student/faculty rations that freed the highest people in the hierarchy for more research) prevented them from acknowledging the role of rhetoric in their activities and the necessity of teaching undergraduate students to write in the professional ways they wrote. To purify their work, they too had to reject as their object the speaking and writing student, to cede the task of consciously, systematically teaching students to use their discourses. A tradition of complaint (Greenbaum) about student writing in the disciplines continues to this day based on the construction of writing as a ding an sich, which should have been taught by others, at some earlier time. By constructing composition as remedial and taking on the professional role of remedial teaching, English was able to both justify its place in the university and distance itself from the activity of studying texts beyond the canon and teaching discourse beyond literary history or, later, criticism. "Composition" proved a remarkably flexible construct for negotiating the boundaries among English departments and the university, as well as between the university and social practices outside it, during the first three decades of the century. It could be constructed in an infinite variety of ways depending on local needs. And it brought a range of rewards, both in the institutional and social credit it afforded and in indirect material rewards (Miller). By constructing composition as a practical, remedial service, with no systematic training necessary to teach it and no research expected of those who did, large numbers of courses could be taught by low-paid, part-time staff, usually women (Miller). In institutions large and small this provided a range of material benefits, from the late nineteenth century, when women and other part-time faculty relieved star faculty such as Kitteridge of his composition teaching duties, until the present. In the 1930s, when some institutions developed large graduate programs in English, composition could be taught by graduate students. This increased the time literature professors had to devote to their central object, the study of canonical texts. Professors doing research were released from the time-consuming activity of improving students writing, as professors in other high-status disciplines were more and more released from teaching composition and even undergraduate literature courses or discussion sections. By separating composition from literature, production from reception, mediation from purification, English was able, from its inception, to appropriate from other disciplines a lecture pedagogy on the German modelmass lectures or whole-class discussion on the "content"thus freeing professors from much reading of and listening to student performances and allowing them time for what came to be constructed in English as research, the interpreting of canonical texts. In institutions where literature professors taught composition (the great majority of them), English was able to maintain larger staffs than many other departments. These large staffs provided more positions in higher education (albethey low status ones) for new Ph.Ds in English than were available in other disciplines, and kept graduate programs largeincreasing the size of English faculty in graduate institutions. Ultimately, larger numbers of faculty and courses increased the influence of English faculty in institutions, and gave department a disproportionately greater voice on committees and faculty governing bodies than its influence outside higher education would otherwise justify. Perhaps the most important advantage of constructing composition as remedial and divorcing it from the central object of professional activity lay in the ability of English to reproduce itself. Selecting and training professional literary critics in large numbers came to depend on composition. Graduate programs financed graduate students through composition teachingparticularly important since English did not raise outside funds that in the mid-20th century came to finance graduate training in scientific disciplines (Parker; Wilson). Moreover, as we have seen, institutions found composition a very useful and flexible construct as well: as one of several means of accomplishing selection, gatekeeping. Composition either could or could not be taught, depending on the needs of the institution. It could be taught to some students and not others, depending on the way the institution constructed "remedial" students. Failure rates in composition courses (at times reaching 50% at some public institutions) provided a subtle form of post-admission selection at public open admissions institutions, where there was public pressure for access. Finally, the construction of composition as remedial allowed English professors to officially distance themselves from the furthest reaches of their network of activity as it extended into the schools, while still preserving some control through the unofficial workings of a mediating network of alliances. Direct links with secondary teachers were left to the NCTE, as mathematics left it to the NCTM and the sciences left it to the NAST and the applied field of science education. Indeed, the NCTE was created in 1912 in response to the MLAs lack of interest in secondary and elementary school education, and the two organizations have until recently had almost no official contact (Stewart). However, college entrance examinations in composition and the almost-universal first-year college composition requirement have powerfully influenced secondary schools to appropriate higher educations constructions of literature and composition, despite the urgings of many in the Deweyan progressive tradition allied with social sciences and psychology (Wilson). Moreover, college English departments retained some measure of control over the training of secondary school teachers; school textbooks were written primarily by English professors; and almost all of the leaders of the NCTE in its formative years were college professors of English. The social credit of English mediated to the wider society through the schools focuses on preservation of a narrow literary canon and a remedial notion of writing as "basic" processes. Conclusion Though English has traditionally constructed itself in opposition to certain aspects of the sciences and social sciences, it also enlisted them (and they it) in constructing its institutional place, through appropriating notions of disciplinary, communication, and pedagogy from the sciences, notions that devalued rhetoric and student production. By simultaneously devaluing rhetoric as an intellectual tradition and using it (reconstructed as composition) to obtain cultural and institutional credit, English was able to flourishwithin very narrow boundariesin a potentially hostile environment. Without composition, English might have had to remain much smaller (as with philosophy) or justify its disciplinary existence thorough other kinds of social involvements, such as community literacy improvement (on the model of psychology [mental health] and sociology [social work]) or service to an industry such as publishing (on the model of journalism, engineering, and other professional schools). But the boundary work accomplished by the construction of general compositionbracketing rhetoric, performance, and pedagogymade it possible for more and more English professors to spend more and more of their working day focused on the emerging object of their discipline's activity, the literary canon, performing their discipline's characteristic action: interpreting the canon for other members of the discipline. In the last twenty years English as a discipline has begun to forge alliances in ways it was denied or rejected a century earlier. The MLA now has pedagogical division, and has some collaborations with the NCTE. Though some 200 English departments grant Ph.D.s in rhetoric and composition, composition, rhetoric, and writing were until 1998 combined into a Special Interest, apart from the pedagogy division, and placed with other traditionally marginalized groups (e.g., women, lecturers and adjuncts, gays and lesbians, the disabled, ethnic studies, and politics). Today rhetoric and composition have their own Division, under the Language Studies category, called History and Theory of Rhetoric and Composition. And the Teaching of Writing now his its own division under the Teaching category. There is a even an MLA technical writing subsection, and a few MLA publications. (There are some 60 graduate programs in professional communication within English departments, though none in the old elite institutions.) In a broader sense, much literary study takes what might be called rhetorical approaches concerns itself with cultural aspects of texts, and texts of a much greater variety. There has also been some networking with the natural and social sciences: MLA Divisions or Discussion Groups exist on Literature and Science, Anthropological Approaches to Literature, and Sociological Approaches to Literature (all within the "Interdisciplinary Approaches" category). Critical theory approaches important in English studies are shared by some other disciplines, at least on their margins. And there is even some small use of social science methods, especially the qualitative variety, in literary study. Whether or not the object of the discipline will change (or has changed) is a matter of continuing, heated debateand historical rethinkings such as this one. But in the wake of the 'culture wars' of the 1980s and 1990s, when its social credit was damaged clearly the profession now sees, and the recently-professionalization field composition, which now employs twenty to thirty percent of new Ph.D.s from English departments, the profession clearly sees a need to extend its networks as it never has before, to give up in certain respects its hard-won purity, and has taken some steps in the direction of mediating its work through and with other powerful social practices. Dame Rhetoric finally found her way into English via the back stairs, as she found her way into the 20th century when it rejected her as too bombastic and unscientific. Notes Adams, Katherine. A History of Professional Writing Instruction in American Colleges. Southern Methodist University P, 1993. Berlin, James A. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges 1900-1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P, 1987. Blair, Hugh. Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1819). Delmar, NY: Scholars Facsimiles & Reprints, 1993. Bledstein, Burton J. The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America. New York: Norton, 1976. Douglas, Wallace. "Accidental Institution: On the Origins of Modern Language Study," in Criticism in the University, ed. Graff and Reginald Gibbons. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1985): 41 ff pp. 77-78 Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Gieryn, Thomas. "Boundary Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science." American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 781-95. Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Graff, Gerald, and Michael Warner. The Origins of Literary Study in America: A Documentary Anthology. New York: Routledge, 1989. Grafton, Anthony, and Lisa Jardine. From Humanism to the Humanities. London: Duckworth, 1986. Greenbaum, Leonard A. "A Tradition of Complaint." College English 31 (1969): 174-78. Hill in Brereton* Hill, Adams Sherman, Briggs, LeBaron R., and Hurlbut, B. S. Twenty Years of School and College English. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 1896. Halloran, S. Michael. "Rhetoric in the American College Curriculum: The Decline of Public Discourse." Pre/Text 3 (1982): 245-69. Kaufer, David S. and Kathleen M. Carley. Communication at a Distance: The Influence of Print on Sociocutural Organization and Change. Hillsdale, N.J. : Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993. Kimball, Bruce A. Orators & Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education. New York: Teachers College P, 1986. Latour, Bruno. (199?) "Drawing Things Together." (pp. *) In Representation in Scientific Practice, Ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press, 1993. Latour, B. (1993). On technical mediation: Philosophy, sociology, genealogy. Common Knowledge, 3, 29-64. Miller, Susan. Rescuing the Subject: A Critical Introduction to Rhetoric and the Writer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P, 1989. Ohmann, Richard. English in America: A Radical View of the Profession. New York: Oxford U P, 1976. Parker, William Riley. "Where Do English Departments Come From?" College English 28 (1967): 339-51. Rudolph, Fredrick. The American College and University: A History. New York: Knopf, 1962. Shumway, R. David. Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994  TOC \f \n Stewart, Warner, Michael. "Professionalization and the Rewards of Literature: 1875-1900," Criticism 27 (Winter 1985): 4 ff. Watts, George B. "The Teaching of French in the US." French Review, 37 (Oct. 1963): 5-165. Wilson, Elizabeth. A Short History of a Border War: Social Science, School Reform, and the Study of Literature." Poetics Today 9 (1988): 711-735. Yates, JoAnne. Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1989. Veysey, Laurence R. The Emergence of the American University. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1965. Scholes, Robert. The Rise and Fall of English Studies: Reconstructing English as a Discipline. New Haven: Yale U P, 1998.  PAGE 9 The story of how composition instruction remained on the fringes of the department, without disciplinary status, has been well told by others. (Berlin, Douglas, Ohmann, Applebee, Miller). Large-scale professionalization is a characteristially modern phenomenon, though it has roots as early as the 18th century. Latour in We Have Never Been Modern uses the phrase work of translation for the activity of tool-mediated networks without gaze of modern purification, though else where he uses the term mediation. John Michael Wozniack's survey of catalogs at thirty-seven eastern colleges shows that these colleges required "compositions, themes, essays" for a mean total of 6.7 semesters (out of eight total possible) during the period from 1850 to 1859. Moreover, fifteen of the thirty-seven colleges required compositions all eight semesters. Over the next three decades, that figure steadily declined, to 3.7 semesters in 1890-99, with only two, Dickinson College and Rutgers University, requiring writing all eight semesters. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, Wozniack concludes, "the time-honored requirement of extra compositions, themes, and essays was still the most extensive way in which composition was taught" (122). 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