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In 2015, Professor Emerita Lucille M. Schultz donated to the University of Cincinnati her set of composition materials gathered from fifteen libraries and collections around the country. With 350 entries ranging from 1785 to 1916, the collection includes picture books for early primary schools, grammar textbooks, student writing, and advanced rhetoric textbooks for undergraduates. The documents afford a thrilling glimpse into nineteenth-century ways of thinking and teaching, highlighting practices we would today identify as prewriting, collaborative invention, freewriting, and object-oriented pedagogy. Composing Legacies relates these pedagogies to expressions of social class, nationalism, and public engagement that run throughout the Victorian era and the Gilded Age. Early chapters show how writing and grammar handbooks aimed to reproduce social hierarchies; later ones show how textbook authors aimed to mitigate lecture-style pedagogy with attention to student backgrounds, personal interests, economic aspirations, and presumed audiences. Often, those authors demonstrated a pronounced interest in national unity, but not without exception. Little-known Confederate textbooks took the ideology of unity to be a form of Northern aggression, promoting the maintenance of state and local traditions through their classroom exercises and sample passages. Composition scholars who see the nineteenth-century as a period of skills-and-drills teaching, devoid of explicit political concern, will find surprises in the archival texts' testimonies about national crises and civic participation. Those scholars will also find that the "social turn" in writing and rhetoric, however recent as a historical framework, has been underway for more than two hundred years.
List of contents
Lucille M. Schultz: Foreword - Christopher Carter and Russel K. Durst: Textbook Histories and Testimonial Legacies - Christopher Carter: Testimony of the Senses: Materialist Pedagogy in Nineteenth-Century Composition Textbooks - Russel K. Durst: Testimony of the Tongue: Grammar, Aspirational Pedagogy, and the Cult of Correctness in Long- Nineteenth- Century Composition - Daniel Floyd: Composing American - Rhiannon Scharnhorst: Jessie Macmillan Anderson: A Composition Microhistory - Kathleen Spada: Elizabeth Spalding: Fellow- Worker in Composition - Christopher Carter and Russel K. Durst: The Long Memory - Contributors - Index.
About the author
Christopher Carter is Divisional Dean of Humanities at the University of Cincinnati. His recent books include Rhetorical Exposures: Confrontation and Contradiction in US Social Documentary Photography, Metafilm: Materialist Rhetoric and Reflexive Cinema, and The Corruption of Ethos in Fortress America: Billionaires, Bureaucrats, and Body Slams.
Russel K. Durst is Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, where he teaches courses in composition, writing pedagogy and research, and English linguistics. He has published numerous books, articles, and chapters in the field of composition studies.
Summary
In 2015, Professor Emerita Lucille M. Schultz donated to the University of Cincinnati her set of composition materials gathered from fifteen libraries and collections around the country.
Report
"Engaging, impactful, and instructive, Composing Legacies makes an essential contribution to both the history of the field and our understanding of historiographic methods. By attending to the overlooked testimonial rhetoric of nineteenth-century composition textbooks, this meticulously researched book complicates our understanding of early composition practices and challenges archival researchers to develop more reflexive and dialogic microhistories of the field."-Lori Ostergaard, Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Oakland University and editor of In the Archives of Composition: Writing and Rhetoric in High Schools and Normal Schools
