Collin reflects on the Watson Conference. Of particular interest, I thought:
Based on a number of conversations, and based upon some of the very stark differences among the plenaries, I am more and more convinced that the next major dispute in our field is going to be conducted between those of us who reside in English departments and think of RhetComp as a member of the English studies family, and those of us who have in mind something more like Writing studies, and who sometimes see English studies as an anchor that keeps us from doing more with our field. Heck, I’ve always been a fan of the idea that I first saw at U Baltimore, where literary study was considered a subset of communication design, rather than patriarch of the language clan.
And frankly, I found more provocative those talks where there weren’t tacit assumptions about the English-iness of our field. And I know that I’m not alone in that regard. I think that we’re going to see, increasingly, scholarship that takes some of our most deeply embedded conceptual disciplinary metaphors to task over the next decade. Some of that work happened at Watson, which was nice. But there’s more on the horizon, I think. As I thought about how I would answer the question implied by “the new work of composing” over the last few days, I kept circling back to a set of issues and directions for inquiry that owe much more to the social and design sciences than to English studies. I think we’re starting to see these developments in various locales, but I think too that it’s on the verge of trickling up.
From my vantage point (as a first year PhD student in an English department, who has a master’s degree in an English department), I think Collin is right to predict this disciplinary issue is going to be a big deal over the next few years. Even as I was trying to decide on a PhD program, this issue of disciplinarity was huge on my mind: Did I want to study in an English Department, or in a department devoted (solely) to rhetoric and writing. Ultimately, this was only a small part of my decision (there were many other factors), but it was an important aspect. I think there’s much validity to calls like those of Kathleen Blake Yancey in her 4C’s address to create departments and majors around Writing Studies. I also think there’s some useful aspects to remaining in English departments. Ultimately, I think, it’s about local situation and politics, and I wouldn’t make a universal mandate to do one or the other. But I do think this issue is going to be something we’ll back tackling for a while.
While I come down “on the fence” of where rhetoric and composition should reside, I do think that the multiple locations of these departments or programs will give us some things to talk about, will, in a way, disrupt stasis, in the Ciceronian sense. Rhetoric and Composition, I think, is in a unique position compared to other humanities fields. For example, most philosophers are in philosophy departments (except when they’re in humanities departments).
(I am still a fan of Robert Scholes’ textual studies approach, that puts various sorts of communication and texts under the same umbrella. Seems like an approach similar to U of Baltimore that Collin describes.)
