Friday, April 18, 2008

'Golden Age' Reference

Off and on for the past few weeks I have been sleuthing around for reference to "the golden age of composition studies." The phrase appears in quotation marks in Lee Odell's "Afterword" to his 1986 CCCC address in Roen's collection, Views from the Center. But those reflective afterwords are somewhat informal; the phrase is not attributed to any source. What to do? I Googled around and didn't find anything promising (how I overlooked it, I cannot be sure, although I bet 'the' article threw me off), but I didn't give up. Instead, I emailed Professor Odell. Research in Y2K08, yeah? He got back to me the same day and said that the phrase, he thought, was credited to Jack Selzer.

Tonight, I located the 'golden age' reference in an English Journal article by Elizabeth Blackburn-Brockman (whose mother-in-law, you might be surprised to learn, was middle school civics teacher and high school Spanish teacher for D. and me both; in the civics class we had to memorize all of Michigan's 83 counties; I will not recite them for you here). That article: "Prewriting, Planning, and Professional Communication," 91.2 (Nov. 2001). In the article, Blackburn-Brockman mentions almost the exact phrase, "a golden age of composition studies," and attributes it not to Selzer, but to Bob Root. She also cites Selzer's 1983 CCC article, "The Composing Process of An Engineer," which offered a processual analysis of engineer Kenneth Nelson, much in the same spirit as Emig's The Composing Process of Twelfth Graders from 1971. Could this be the golden age? 1971-1983?

The phrase from Root (whom I never met, but who taught in the English Dept. where I took Freshman Composition in 1992 from his colleague, Phillip Dillman) shows up in the Introduction to a collection of non-fiction he edited with Michael Steinberg, Those Who Do, Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching: A Sourcebook (1996). Is there a copy in our Bird Library at Syracuse? No, of course not. Seems it's one of the few books we don't have.

I considered emailing my program's listserv to ask whether anyone had a copy I could borrow, but rather than bother the list with a request, I figured I would try the library's interlibrary loan system, ILLiad. I haven't used ILLiad since 2005, so, of course, I couldn't remember my password. I tried to reset the password, and when I did, the system sent me a blank email message. Here's what was in the message: . Thus, here ends the trail for tonight. I know where the "golden age" reference comes from, and the source, to my surprise, is not quite as middle-of-the-road as I expected it would be. That said, I do think Root knows composition studies, or at least certain veins of it, very well, even if I couldn't begin to speculate how many CCCC's he's attended (more and more often, I tend to think of disciplinary centrality in terms of trips to the flagship conference, whether verifiable or guessed at; and yes, I know this is just one of many possible metrics).

Why, after all, am I questing for the golden age reference? Well, for one thing, my own research has lately gotten me thinking more about the implicit disciplinary prototypes underlying suggestions of disciplinary fragmentation (viz., Smit's endism or Fulkerson's "new theory wars"). And so, if there has been a golden age of composition studies, I'm curious about it, curious as well about the idea of disciplinary ages (and whatever it is that makes them seem plausible).

Posted by Derek Mueller at April 18, 2008 10:45 PM to Methods