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Argues for a broadening of the range of rhetorical positions to which writing students are presently assigned. Envisions current practices of composition from the political left. Proposes a rhetorical position from which writing might become a means of cultural transformation. (HB)

Argues that both composition and literary studies have a common pedagogical vocation and that by harvesting some very general insights from two decades of cultural critique, English departments can develop curricula that will resolve a good deal of the conflict between literature and composition and improve instruction in both. (SC)

In his review essay, \"Out of the Fashion Industry: From Cultural Studies to the Anthropology of Knowledge\" (CCC 47.3, October 1996, pp. 424-36), Kurt Spellmeyer writes from a position largely incurious about its own cultural and historical formation, from what might be called an autobiographical position. After having criticized Henry Giroux for a failure to \"step down from theory's arid heights\" to the realities of the classroom (the very issue that Giroux himself is concerned with!), Spellmeyer subtly shifts the \"real split\" from that between theory and practice to that \"between two different versions of professional authority\" (427). [...]the concept of culture helped teach us that differences among people should only be understood relatively. The growth of interdisciplinary education and research, the revolution in information technologies, the increasing saturation of our students' lives with media controlled by international conglomerates, the disappearance of public forums, the impending desiccation of the humanities by the political and fiscal pressure of global capitalismall these and more suggest the need for new critical methods, new research, new pedagogies.

Composition, however, was framed as inherently remedial, an ensemble of \"skills\" that the pedestrian might acquire in order to better serve the managerial elite for which their education was designed to qualify them. [...]the history of rhetoric and composition in this country has had continually to accommodate two contradictory impulses: the liberal belletristic and the pragmatic functionalist (a story well told by Berlin, Brereton, Connors, Crowley, Susan Miller, and others). [...]although composition cannot be reduced to a reified body of knowledge (i.e., a discipline), we need also to insist that our communal work is a tradition, a form of intellectual property that must be protected, reproduced, revised, and transmitted to new colleagues as they join this specialized conversation that we refer to as \"rhetoric and composition\" (a compound term that itself points to an enterprise joining theory and application). Virginia Anderson has made this case persuasively in a recent essay To carry on our extra-, trans-, or post-disciplinary work, therefore, composition studies must have and exercise the institutional power of professional organization; we must have professional forums to do the work of adjusting tradition to the emerging social needs of our students; and we must have the specialized professional discourse (the multiple theoretical languages) to work out what has to be done to meet these needs.

Offers two essays responding to Horner's article in a previous issue of this journal. Argues for redefinition of \"professionalization,\"\"evaluation,\" and the uses of professional authority in relation to students' and other laypeople's knowledges. Discusses the need for professional organizations and unions, and the ongoing need to theorize one's subject/discipline/profession. Includes Horner's response. (SR)

France comments on Thomas O'Donnell's essay \"Politics and Ordinary Language,\" which is about pedagogical politics, and O'Donnell responds to France's critique.

Argues that both composition and literary studies have a common pedagogical vocation and that by harvesting some very general insights from two decades of cultural critique, English departments can develop curricula that will resolve a good deal of the conflict between literature and composition and improve instruction in both.