| dc.description.abstract | This study argues for the importance of analyzing individual students’ responses to writing instruction in crafting histories of the field of rhetoric and composition. I engage in an archival study of student writing at the University of Kansas during the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, specifically through a genre-based local history analysis of a course called “Advanced English Composition” and two women writers who were enrolled in it. In particular, I examine the ways in which these students write within, against, and even beyond the genres they are required to complete for their courses. Recent histories of the field of rhetoric and composition have taken a revisionist turn, examining the contributions to writing instruction’s past of more diverse sites and subjects than those studied in the 1980s and 1990s. Even within this revisionist turn, however, the degree to which student writings play a role in these histories varies widely. Sometimes student writing serves as briefly-mentioned artifacts used in service of other research goals, such as recovering the work of teachers. Other times, students and their writings are scarcely mentioned at all. This is especially problematic in that rhetoric and composition claims to be a field that heavily values student writing. If rhetoric and composition is as closely reliant on students and their writing as it professes, if student texts truly are what Joseph Harris calls “a form of currency in the knowledge economy of composition” (Harris 667), the same ought to be said of the narratives produced of composition’s past. In the first part of this study, I provide a larger contextualization of writing instruction at the University of Kansas during this particular time period. I examine archival materials within this genre system, such as course catalogues, instructor diaries, department of English publications, faculty meeting minutes and more, all of which allowed me to situate student writings more fully within the contexts and genre system of their production. In the second part of this study, I analyze the writings of two women students enrolled in “Advanced English Composition,” Margaret Kane and Kate Hansen, using rhetorical genre theory and theories of uptake. I perform an extensive analysis of two sets of genres that these women were required to produce as part of their courses—the 1899 course notes of Margaret and the 1900 course papers of Kate. I argue that these women’s writings illustrate the phenomenon of uptake chains, and that the individual genres in which Margaret and Kate compose both enable and constrain their responses in differing ways, as well as carry and impart ideological beliefs. However, I likewise demonstrate that Margaret’s and Kate’s responses are unique and worthy of careful analysis; each woman manages to write herself within the genres they were required to produce, modifying genres even in small ways to fit their individual responses to the writing instruction they received, and occasionally even to carry out their own goals and purposes. This study as a whole cultivates a more inclusive, representative narrative of the field’s history that values the experiences of women students, rather than assuming that students responded to instruction in the same ways, likewise carrying implications for writing teachers today. | |
