Textbooks and the Evolution of the Discipline

Abstract

The last twenty-five years have seen an unprecedented surge in the scholarship surrounding writing and the teaching of writing. We are in the midst of an information boom, and for those of us whose professional views have been developed and shaped by reading scholarly journals it is difficult to imagine things any other way. But today's discipline of composition studies is really a very new one. Before 1930, the teaching of rhetoric and writing in American colleges went forward with no important influence from journals at all. During the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, composition theory and pedagogy were overwhelmingly shaped by one great force: textbooks. The course we have inherited today owes much to the forms and genres of textbooks that rhetoric spun off as it devolved after 1860 from a theoretical to a practical pedagogy. In this essay I want to examine the intricate quadrille that textbooks have danced with the teaching of writing in America. Such an examination will show that composition textbooks as they developed between 1820 and the present have always responded to the preferences of the teachers cast up by the culture, meeting their perceived needs and recreating these and other needs in later teachers shaped by the texts. What, first of all, is a composition textbook? We cannot, I think, define it as any book used in any way in a rhetoric or composition course, because books of countless unrelated sorts have been dragged into writing classes over the years, as Albert Kitzhaber has shown.' Even books that are specifically rhetorical are not always texts, since not every rhetorical book was written to structure a pedagogy in writing. Rhetoric books before 1800 were treatises, not textbooks. American composition grew from rhetoric, and although com-