Abstract
More than ten years ago, the late James Berlin—a leading advocate of a cultural studies approach to composition and an outspoken opponent of expressivism—remarked to me that what we have come to know as expressivist theories in composition are only a small part of a much wider experimentation, some of which was overtly political, in the late 60s and early 70s. When I began reading Geoffrey Sirc's English Composition as a Happening, I was hoping to learn more about that range of experiment. However, while there is much discussion of the avant garde traditions in the visual arts that produced "happenings" in the 1960s, and about work in composition that Sirc connects to these traditions, there is almost nothing about overtly political experiments in composition or about the social forces of the 1960s that informed the context in which teachers such as Ken Macrorie and William Coles developed an alternative to academic discourse. Sirc's book is offbeat, eccentric, and not all that reader-friendly to scholars who are not particularly interested in aesthetic debates in the visual arts. Nevertheless, for all its quirkiness, Sirc's book is too interesting to ignore.
Published Version
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