Dappled Discipline at Thirty: An Interview with Janice M. Lauer

Abstract

2014 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Janice M. Lauer’s “Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline,” in which Lauer looks back to the field’s “pioneering efforts” at cobbling together a disciplinary identity—as she articulated, the field of rhetoric and composition’s most important questions “would have remained isolated and unexplored as they had been for decades if it were not for … a shared trait of these early theorists—their willingness to take risks, to go beyond the boundaries of their traditional training into foreign domains in search of starting points, theoretical launching pads from which to begin investigating these questions” (21). This interview reengages Lauer’s suggestion that the field’s early boundary-crossing transformed rhetoric and composition into a multifaceted and dappled discipline composed of a manifold of theoretical and onto-epistemological perspectives.