Bibliographic Research in Composition Studies. Vicki Byard

      1 Directions to the Parlor: The Need for a Guide to Scholarship in Composition Studies

      The publisher of this book, Parlor Press, derives its name from a frequently quoted passage by theorist Kenneth Burke, a passage especially relevant to this text’s mission of guiding readers to a discipline’s scholarship:

      Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. (110–11)

      Although Burke used this metaphor to describe the drama of human existence—you enter the parlor at your birth, mature to participate in the “unending conversation” of civilization, and then exit the parlor upon your death—the passage is sometimes quoted in composition scholarship as an apt description of how knowledge is constructed in an academic discipline. When a student or other newcomer first encounters a discipline, she finds its scholars engaged in an intense conversation that has been evolving since the discipline’s inception. If the student is intrigued by the conversation taking place, she listens—she studies it—until she is informed enough to join the conversation herself as a publishing scholar. Consistent with Burke’s metaphor, the conversation of a discipline—its scholarship—continues beyond any one individual’s participation.

      Gary Olson is one composition specialist who has written explicitly about the correlation between an ongoing conversation and scholarship in composition studies. In his essay “Publishing Scholarship in Rhetoric and Composition: Joining the Conversation,” Olson depicts a scene quite similar to Burke’s metaphor of a parlor conversation:

      [I]magine a faculty cocktail party in which various colleagues and their spouses are standing in groups sipping cocktails and engaging in intimate, sometimes passionate discussions. After freshening your cocktail, you approach several people discussing the influence of postmodern theory on composition pedagogy. Obviously, it would be considered rude to jump immediately into the conversation that had been going on before you arrived. Basic etiquette dictates that you join the group, quietly listen to what is being said, and develop a sense of the larger conversation—both its tone and content—before you begin to make a contribution. The same kind of dynamics attend to the scholarly conversation. Before rushing into print about this or that subject, it is imperative that you read what is currently being said about the subject, discover what the positions are and who is taking what position, and in general, acquire a sense of the larger conversation. (21)

      In quoting both Burke and Olson at length, I invite you to imagine the scholarship of composition studies as a lively conversation that is well underway. Is this a conversation you would like to listen to and perhaps eventually join? If so, this book will aid you by providing directions for finding the composition studies’ parlor, that is, the books, journals, and other sites where the scholarly conversations of this discipline are taking place. In writing this guide, I hope to both ease and speed your entry into this scholarly conversation.

      For Writing and Discussion

      1. If the scholarship of composition studies can be aptly described as a conversation taking place in a parlor, what experiences have led you to the doorway of this parlor? Why are you interested in stepping inside to hear the conversation?

      2. Suppose that you are interested in reading more about composition studies but can’t now imagine that you might join the conversation by publishing in the future. What value might you still find in simply listening to the conversation for a while?

The Need for Student-Centered Introductions to Composition Studies

      Guides written specifically to introduce advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students to the discipline of composition studies, such as this text, are only now beginning to be published. One reason is because composition studies emerged as a discipline relatively recently. In his article “Composition History and Disciplinarity,” Robert Connors states that “we can trace the possibility of the field of composition studies” (8) from the New Rhetoric of the 1960s, but that “the founding decade of the disciplinarity of composition studies” (8) was the 1970s, the decade when much serious scholarship in rhetoric and composition began to be published and when the first rhetoric doctoral programs in English departments were formed. However, it wasn’t until the 1980s, writes Connors, that composition studies experienced the “full-blown growth of disciplinarity” (10).

      Since then, the composition studies parlor has become increasingly populated with students. According to surveys published periodically in the