Instructor: LaVecchia
M 9:30 AM – 12:20 PM
History of Composition Studies will explore multiple narratives framing the growth and trajectory of the field. The course is appropriate both for students seeking a foundational orientation for further study as well as for those seeking to complicate their understanding of how and why the field’s pedagogical practices and research questions have come into being.
Commonly, the field’s “origins” are located at the turn of the 20th century at Harvard, continuing through its establishment as a scholarly research and teaching discipline in the 1970s to the present day. The course will expand these narrative frames in several ways: trouble Harvard as progenitor (e.g., Brereton); take up material and technological perspectives on composition’s formation (e.g., Palmeri; Strickland); widen the intersection of writing, pedagogy, and politics (e.g., Kynard; Ruiz and Sánchez); and discuss the variety of foci identified in our disciplinary research and guiding our disciplinary identity (e.g., Harris; Miller).