The History of Composition: Reclaiming Our Lost Generations.

College Composition and Communication convention in Boston, I was distressed but not surprised to hear panelists Janet Emig and Janice Lauer, whose contributions to composition studies are unquestionably of high est significance, characterize themselves as members of genera tion of our field. Professor Emig went so far as to accuse her juniors of ahistoricity, claiming that members of current third generation fail to distinguish between achievements of first and second generations (Sisypha). Professor Lauer accused Karen Burke LeFevre, in particular, of having slighted important work on invention by her predecessors in 1960s and 1970s (Disciplinary). From where I sat, however, it seemed that Lauer and Emig, no less than LeFevre, were participants in long aca demic tradition whereby authors of newer works dismiss previous work as old-fashioned or inadequate. Worse, in describing themselves and others who came to prominence in 1960s as members of composition's first generation, Emig and Lauer were claiming not to have had predecessors. Emig and Lauer are not alone in discounting contributions of composition teachers who labored in 1940s and 1950s or of those who taught in early decades of twentieth century. Stephen North has chosen to date birth of field to 1963, as if nothing before that were worth talking about (15). Although other historians have focussed on nineteenth century, and particularly on period after Civil War when composition courses first appeared in American colleges and universities, sixty years between roughly 1900 and 1960 have been characterized as a period of stagnation in history of composition and as a period in which rhetoric, an approach developed in late nineteenth century, operated as a monolithic and increasingly obstructive paradigm. James Berlin shrugs off first three decades of twentieth century as a period during which current-traditional rhetoric went virtually unchallenged as dominant paradigm for teaching of composition (Writing 85; Rhetoric 9). Donald Stewart derides current-traditional rhetoric as belong ing to the Stone Age of our discipline (History 17). Robert Connors