The article is about the tension between literary studies and composition & rhetoric.
One senior member of our English faculty took a look at this situation and published a response in the moral-panic genre, representing feelings widely held by his colleagues. By his account, literary studies is being "devalued and dismissed" as a result of English departments’ being "reconceived as being primarily in the business of teaching expository writing." Furthermore, he wrote, there’s an insidious rush "to make literary studies an outpost of ‘digital scholarship.’ "
Don’t ask me what that last part means, but it’s clear that the villains of the piece have spent their careers in rhetoric, composition, comparative media studies, and digital publication. The amazing thing about the panic at Emory? Most colleges like it have three to five graduate faculty members in those areas; Emory went a decade without even one, and it grudgingly broke that tradition only on the eve of accreditation and program review.
That a large percentage of tenure-track hires in English is consistently allocated to composition and rhetoric reflects the rational, reasonable, and growing interest in fields specializing in the conditions of textual production at a moment when textual production is undergoing the greatest shift since Gutenberg. More people are doing more kinds of composition than ever before, and they want to learn to do it better.I am quiet about my fascination with this topic because it is a touchy one.
The work people are doing in literature is important and valuable, but like so many disciplines in the humanities, there is a bit of an inferiority complex. The same is true in comp/rhet, but with the growing importance of composition studies, I can see how they might feel like someone is edging in on their turf.
Whatever you think of either discipline, this article illustrates how/where the interdisciplinary tension is developing now.
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