1977. Brent Henze
writing persuades. Although Robert Connors has claimed that Bain’s modal curriculum effectively died by the 1950s as exposition came to dominate the other modes (“Rise and Fall”), in fact it appears more accurate to us to say that the modes were simply being renegotiated—their number, their functions, their relationships. Any number of textbooks and readers and courses were still organized according to some version of the modes, and in those courses students were directed through a series of modal assignments, one after the next, that were illustrated in the readers. A description assignment might be followed by narration, comparison, analysis, classification, and definition—or some other combination might be offered. In other words, if exposition was gaining headway as the chief kind of mode, it was also generating its own kind of modal arrangements: static forms of one kind or another into which, according to current-traditional thinking, students were implored to pour information.
These current-traditional approaches to writing instruction were welcomed into many English departments in part because of the long history of New Criticism in those departments. After a text-based pedagogy for criticism was created by the publication of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry in 1938, John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism in 1941, and Rene Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature in 1942, many writing courses began to incorporate New Critical values. New Critical faith in the autonomy of art and artists, and New Critical respect for stylistic achievement, easily dovetailed with current traditionalism, which also eschewed politics and emphasized style; and New Critical regard for written artifacts over artistic processes or cultural and rhetorical contexts reinforced current-traditional pedagogical doctrine as well. New Critics walled off so-called “literary” (and hence “timeless”) discourses from everyday ones, insisting on distinguishing the special connotative beauty of literary language from matter-of-fact scientific denotation. New Critics quite literally gave rhetoric a bad name, regarding everyday discourses as beneath their consideration, and their disdain for what they regarded as ephemeral writing translated itself in many composition classes into attention to Great Works and Great Writers, as opposed to student writing and more popular and rhetorical culture. It is true that by 1977 the New Criticism was losing momentum, as we have indicated: close analyses of literary texts had become stale with every new microanalysis, and even Rene Wellek was seeing its shortcomings in the famous essay he was writing in 1977, “The New Criticism: Pros and Cons.” But New Criticism and current traditionalism continued to affect classroom practices well into the next decade—even as they affect classrooms today.
Indeed, at many colleges and universities during the 1970s the composition class comfortably doubled as an introduction to Great Ideas or to canonical literary texts that were part of an established literary canon that provided “content” for students to write about. A number of composition-and-literature textbooks accommodated these courses, as they had for decades (Crowley, Composition, chapter 5). If the courses did not always emphasize explicitly literary genres of poetry, drama, and fiction, then they often offered up an analogous “canon” of “artistic” nonfiction or an introduction to Great Ideas in the sciences, the arts, and the humanities that could generate material for student essays. The best-selling 1977 edition of The Norton Reader, for example, accommodated both approaches: it included familiar essays by people like E.B. White, Wallace Stegner, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Jefferson, James Thurber, Niccolo Machiavelli, Jacob Bronowski, Loren Eiseley, John Henry Newman, X. J. Kennedy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jonathan Swift, and George Orwell (“A Modest Proposal” and “Politics and the English Language” to be sure), along with 1960s-inspired items by Eldridge Cleaver, Dee Brown, George Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Toni Morrison; and it organized itself according to heady titles like History, Ethics, Human Nature, Education, Mind, Politics and Government, and Literature and the Arts. (For that matter, it offered a table of contents that permitted teachers to teach the expository modes from the book as well.) Current traditionalism in 1977 was fed by many other textbooks in the Norton tradition and many other handbooks in the Harbrace tradition: enthusiastic imitation followed imitation.
Process Pedagogies
But criticism of New Critical and current-traditional approaches to composition was coming from several sources, among them the proponents of two student-centered pedagogies with roots in the 1960s and in the social sciences: expressivism and cognitivism. Besides being mutually convinced of the relative autonomy of writers from social circumstances (still something of a given in the 1970s), both expressivists and cognitivists claimed to be fundamentally concerned with the “composing process” of writers: they therefore promoted what we now know as “process pedagogies.” But the two groups treated the composing process somewhat differently and expected different behaviors from student writers. Though there was actually considerable common ground between the two camps, in 1977 expressivist and cognitivist advocates of process were in fact competing for priority in the field and promoting different basic principles and pedagogical strategies.15
Expressivists, who during the 1960s had ridiculed traditional composition classrooms for promoting humdrum current-traditional formulas and a neutral voice that Ken Macrorie had dubbed “Engfish,” accommodated process pedagogies in the 1970s rather easily. Indeed, when back-to-basics advocates attacked personal voice pedagogies and the creativity-oriented classroom tactics of the expressivists, expressivists often defended themselves by adopting a process perspective. In his 1972 book The Authentic Voice: A Pre-Writing Approach to Student Writing, for example, Donald Stewart (following Robert Zoellner, and Gordon Rohman and Albert Wlecke) had blamed contemporary teachers for using methods that “teach students how to judge their finished work but not how to produce it”—a development which, Stewart went on to say, “implies a fundamental shift in attention away from the product of writing toward the process by which that product eventually gets on paper” (19). Along with Macrorie, William Coles, Donald Murray, and Peter Elbow, Stewart argued that student writing would improve if students could be given the opportunity and the space to exercise their writing abilities extensively, especially in the earliest stages of the writing process. Accordingly, what were known as “pre-writing techniques” and other process-oriented strategies (e.g., free writing, reflective writing, journal keeping), essential expressivist pedagogies designed to promote student growth through writing, were promoted for the composition classroom to achieve the expressivist aims of personal growth, authenticity, self-discovery, and voice:
The primary goal of any writing course is self-discovery for the student and [. . .] the most visible indication of that self-discovery is the appearance, in the student’s writing, of an authentic voice. It proceeds from the second conviction that the techniques of pre-writing, developed in the 1960s, will best help the student develop this authentic voice. (Stewart, Preface xii)
While expressivists agreed about the importance of the writing process, they committed themselves to somewhat different specific approaches. Coles, an iconoclastic product of Theodore Baird’s writer-centered pedagogies at Amherst (see Varnum) who had become the composition director at Pittsburgh (where he influenced David Bartholomae, who arrived about the same time), was teaching students to develop an effective, individual style that would emerge if they would write frequently about their personal viewpoints and experiences, discuss their writing with others, and use the responses of others (rather than formal rules) to guide their revisions. In The Plural I (1978), Coles in the vein of Macrorie denounced “themewriting” as the inevitable result of most current composition pedagogy and encouraged students to become adept at more expressive than formulaic communications. Elbow in a similar vein was contending that people learn to write not from textbooks but from actually writing and reflecting on that writing; his Writing without Teachers (1973) provided prompts that encouraged a variety of activities, from freewriting to reflection to exchange. While he was careful to emphasize that his approach was designed ultimately to produce better written products, Elbow was widely appreciated for encouraging writers to explore freely their developing thoughts through multiple drafts. And he was adamant about the need to deflect critical attention away from formal matters, including correctness, until very late in the composing process. But Elbow’s approach was not asocial: while he emphasized the need for students to develop personal identities through writing, he also encouraged them to consider audiences for their documents and to learn how to function in communities through discourse. In an appendix to Writing without Teachers, Elbow offered “The Doubting Game and the Believing