Course Description for Engl 591

Description and Goals for engl 591:

English 591 is primarily a reading course. We will be reading contemporary composition theory and theoretical work in other fields that has been influential in composition studies. Most of what we’ll discuss has been written since 1963, the date many scholars use to identify the birth of contemporary composition as an academic field, but we’ll be looking at some historical accounts of the earliest American composition courses and at a few earlier essays on composition that have been more or less overlooked.

The course has two broad goals:

The first goal is to provide you with an historically organized (over)view of scholarship that has influenced composition in the last 40 to 50 years. To help in providing context for constructing a disciplinary narrative we will begin with a brief historical sketch of changes in the first-year college student population over the past fifty years or so.  After that, we will take special note of both generative professional events, such as the formation of the CCCC organization and the Dartmouth Conference, and broader social and cultural events such as the initiation of the era of open admissions. 

The second goal is to examine the means by which theories are built and knowledge is developed in composition studies. Toward this end, we will pay special attention to citation webs as well as explicit discussions of how knowledge is being developed.