Postpostmodern Compositionist

Apropos to my post about literacy narratives this morning, I was looking through my files and found a bibliography of scholarship about literacy narratives that I compiled during my first quarter (Fall 2024) at UC Davis. I mentioned that my next post would involve a new and improved literacy narrative, and while that is definitely still coming, I thought I would share this bibliography with the Internet in hope that it may be useful to someone someday.  While by no means comprehensive, this 28-source bibliography offers a solid sense of the directions that research on the literacy narrative genre has taken. Keep in mind that the bibliography does not consider sources that may have been published since the fall of 2024. Looking at the publication dates of the different articles, one can see that interest in the literacy narrative seems to have peaked around the early 2010s, though a steady stream of articles have been published continuing into the 2020s. See the histogram below:...

For today's post, I want to feature a literacy narrative that I wrote in 2021, which I just submitted to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN). You can read my literacy narrative at this link . The literacy narrative genre has had a long presence within the field and for this reason I think the post is relevant enough to the subject matter of this blog.  To give some context, around 2021 I was finishing up my master's degree in literature at CSULB, and while most of my master's coursework pertained to American literature, I completed this literacy narrative as part of an assignment for a rhetoric and composition seminar. As I wrote this literacy narrative over five years ago, while I think I have significantly improved as a writer since then, today I am mostly happy with the quality of the piece other than the fact that I think it contains too many commas. It is also important to note that this is the only literacy narrative I have ever written. Another scene fr...

In my last blog post , I briefly discussed my scholarly forays into the historical conversation around composition and abolitionism, which included a revisiting of Sharon Crowley's concept of "composition's ethic of service." Last quarter, when I was researching and writing my seminar paper about the New Abolitionists, I stumbled across a 1999 essay from Rebecca Moore Howard titled "The New Abolitionism Comes to Plagiarism," which was published in the edited collection Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World . For anyone following this blog, one already knows that a pre-2010 book with the word "postmodern" in its title is always a prime candidate for a blog post. Due to a lack of time, I was not able to include Howard's essay into my seminar paper, however upon reading it yesterday I find that it offers a dynamic argument that not only portrays the New Abolitionist conversation in a new light, but also offers ...

In my last blog post I discussed the 1996 collection  Composition in the Twenty-First Century , and it looks like I am not quite done writing about it yet!  A  segment of text from David Bartholomae's paper caught my eye, where Bartholomae offers an interesting and lengthy definition of the enterprise we call composition. I found the first part of this definition thought provoking and it is reproduced below:  "It is, rather, a set of problems produced by a wider, more diffuse set of practices and desires, usually brought into play by instances of language change or variety (or by the possibility that writing might change or be various). In a sense, the history of composition has been the record of institutional and professional responses to challenged standards, challenges to a standard of writing produced by writers who were said to be unprepared. Composition marked the people and places charged to prepare those students and/or defend and rationalize their "un...

Last quarter, while conducting research for a seminar paper on the New Abolitionism, I came across the 1996 book Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change , which collects twenty three papers presented at the eponymous Conference on Composition in the 21st Century in 1993.  The book includes a history by Robert Connors that traces abolitionist impulses in composition studies back to the first writing requirement at Harvard University in the 19th century. Through some querying on CompPile, I discovered that Connors' piece was published a second time in the 1995 book Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction , so for good measure, I also decided to check out this book to see if there were any differences between the two versions. Upon procuring both books, I learned that Reconceiving Writing contained an updated version of Connors' paper, which I decided to use for my own seminar paper. The title page of the collection.   While no longer ne...