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Composition, English, and the University

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jean Ferguson Carr
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Extract

The role composition plays in the contemporary American university, particularly in relation to the english department, has changed from the days when composition was not an expertise but a duty. Initiated on the college level in the 1870s, as John Brereton has argued, at a time much like our own, when the American college was “in danger of becoming irrelevant to a rapidly changing nation” (3), composition consolidated the many kinds of writing done in the courses (and in the extracurriculum) of universities into a required academic subject, positioned at the threshold of college education. It was charged with preparing students for the rigors of college study and for citizenship and professional life. For many generations of college English teachers, composition was an expected part of the job: everyone, whatever their specialty, taught first-year writing.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 129 , Issue 3 , May 2014 , pp. 435 - 441
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2014

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