Serendipitous text day, today. Started yesterday actually, when one of
the cohort at SU distributed an email to the grad list asking if anyone was
interested in a scattershot of duplicate journals she had–JAC,
Composition Studies, Business something or another, CCC.
Excess copies of a smattering of non-sequential, eight-year-old journals.
I clicked on reply, politely accepted the copies of JAC and
Composition Studies. Already had the copies of CCC (maybe), and
decided the business items wouldn’t get any time because my reading list has
grown immensely in these four months. I ‘d swear the heap of reading grows
by four books every day and reduces only by a chapter or two–the pattern of my
low-effort break, anyway.
I lumbered up to the office for some pre-term PDFing around noon today,
grabbed the journals from my mail slot in the lounge, and set to leafing through
the tables of contents. First pick: JAC 17.1 1997. A couple
of interesting finds, but most notable was a review of JoAnn Cambell’s edit of
Gertrude Buck’s work, Toward a Feminist Rhetoric: The Writing of Gertrude
Buck. What. have. we. here? See, I just signed up to give an overview
of Campbell’s book on Buck for CCR611. Actually, the bit will cover the
historiographic method employed by Campbell. Picked it from a generous
list of histories of comp; grabbed up this text even though I read it late in
the last century (spring of ’99) for EN555M, a seminar in feminist composition
history. The review, by Virginia Allen, introduces several sharp bits on
"excavating our disciplinary roots." Allen’s review is duly generous to
both Campbell and Buck; jogged my memory, too, about Buck’s vexing "organic
scientism"–tendencies to lever metaphors of nature and evolution (growth?)
against the logics of biological and human sciences. No need to go farther
with this just yet, and, of course, I’ve said very little about Campbell’s
method, so that remains–among many other busy-makers–for the weeks ahead.