Goggin

Goggin, Maureen Daly. Authoring a Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the Post-World War II
Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000.

Goggin uses a historical study of 9 seminal journals in the field of Rhet/Comp to demonstrate how the discipline coalesced, as well as to show how the journals have shaped the field (and its concerns). At stake for Goggin is how we imagine and define ourselves as a field, and she calls for reimagining the field outside of English departments, by which she means an interdisciplinary approach. Goggin's methodology is to emphasize the "dialectical relation with a discipline" (xiv): that a discipline is shaped by its journals/publications, but that those also play a key role in the discipline's development. For rhet/comp, then, this is important because it's not merely a standard historical narrative of the field; instead, it shows the various ways in which constraints, conventions, attitudes about teaching/writing/scholarship, etc have played key roles in the ways our ideas about writing, teaching, and knowing have developed.

Key terms: "discipliniographer" --one who writes/shapes a discipline through writing
"density of publications" -- levels of productivity in journals
"create, preserve, and use knowledge" -- 3 aims of any discipline

Key points of her book:
"With the emergence of disciplines and the rise of departments, rhetoric as a system was dissected. Theory was separated from practice, practice from product, and all 3 from pedagogy" (13).

"In response to mounting pressures, teachers and scholars scrambled for practical methods of teaching a wider range of new, nontraditional students in basic writing. This scramble set up a tension between those who were turning toward more speculative projects to create, preserve, and use knowledge about writing, reading, and teaching, and those who sought more pragmatic and immediate answers to help them face new challenges in their classrooms. Ever at the front were continued efforts to raise the proverbial status of the field and a stronger push toward creating a discipline" (76).

"Rhetoric and composition began to define itself through a search for explanations, including empirical, historical, theoretical, and philosophical, of the ways literate and oral discourse practices were learned and functioned in various settings. A shift of attention away from practical and pedagogical issues in writing instruction toward understanding discursive practices and learning processes more broadly conceived is discernible in the professional literature published during this time" (79). [She's referring here to the period between 1965-1980).

"The conundrum of our field is to figure out how we are to explain and cope with a public who, paradoxically, is so absolutely certain that they know all there is to know about us when it is ceratin that they have absolutely no inkling who we are, what we do, why we do it, and how we do it" (191).

Goggin asks us to employ what she terms "marketing myopia" to reimagine ourselves.

"Whether we draw on Young, Becker, and Pike's definition of rhetoric or some other, we need to find powerfully flexible frames to redefine ourselves in ways that allow us to configure the triad of creating, preserving, and using knowledge" (205).

Goggin responds to Crowley by addressing similar issues; unlike Crowley, she doesn't advocate for the abolition of a particular trope or anything other than a recognition of our history and how it's shaped what we have come to believe and do. I think that Goggin does a bit better job in demonstrating how certain beliefs still remain. Crowley seems to suggest -- though often indirectly -- that certain beliefs have been overcome, though she marshals them against freshman composition for its adherence to humanist subjectivities. Together, Crowley and Goggin allow a fuller picture of the discipline because of their diverse approaches and how they demonstrate the field's commitments.

This is what I find most useful about this book; really, it was useful in seeing the history of publications and the relationship between published work and the field itself. However, there isn't much else that's directly useful in it for now. One major critique I have at this point is that the book isn't well-written. I know that publication is all too often rushed for tenure or other things, so I can't be too critical, but as I was reading (and then again as I wrote this post) I was reminded of this fact.

Later: Goggin's usefulness on invention.