ENG 5700 Fall 2018 Fiscus

English 5700 considers composition theory as it has emerged throughout our field’s history. This class will begin with a discussion of key understandings of our field today, using Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle’s Naming What We Know (2015) and then apply a historical perspective to those concepts in order to understand how they have developed over time. Most often, composition’s history is thought of as linear, a narrative of success. Although we will learn how our history has been told through Joseph Harris’s canonical historical text, A Teaching Subject (2012), we will complicate our understanding of composition history and our consequent theoretical understanding of composition through historical texts in Susan Miller’s Norton Book of Composition Studies (2009), along with excerpts of various texts that re-see composition’s history, including Jason Palmeri’s Remixing Composition (2012) and Shari Stenberg’s Repurposing Composition: Feminist Interventions for a Neoliberal Age (2015). Assignments will include two smaller projects and one final project.