JAC Volume 9

Shortly after it was published, Stephen North’s The Making of Knowledge in Composition came up in conversation with a candidate for a rhetoric and composition position at my university. The candidate, fresh out of graduate school, commented that the book would be a lot better if it didn’t have such a strong thesis. I played it cool but wondered whether thesis writing had become passê and I had simply missed the revolution. Since then, the book has been lambasted for its smart-aleck tone, applauded for its scope and ambition, and recommended for every graduate student in the field. The Making of Knowledge in Composition is not a book that readers feel neutral about. Since the work has already been widely reviewed, I’ll do less summarizing in favor of more exploration of its impact on readers.

The purpose of North’s text is twofold: to describe the modes of inquiry that characterize composition studies, and to account for their emergence since the literacy crisis that was declared in the early 1960s. To describe the nature of inquiry in composition, North identifies three major “methodological communities"—scholars, researchers, and practitioners—which he further divides into various subcultures, whose labels make their interests fairly self-evident Historians, philosophers, and critics make up the community of scholars; experimentalists, clinicians, formalists, and ethnographers compose the research community. The third community, the practitioners, make up the field’s “indigenous population,” whose claims to knowledge, North argues, have been rejected and whose members have been relegated to the ghetto of the classroom as a consequence of compositionists’ scramble to achieve professional respectability.

North describes the chief concerns and assumptions of each of these subcultures and then analyzes the success of each community according to the criteria he establishes for each. There are obvious pitfalls in this approach, rendering the book subject to the criticisms that beset any classification system, from literary genres to flora and fauna: why call a tomato a fruit when we use it as a vegetable? If The Sound and the Fury is a novel, why not Dubliners? Categories are always constructs that are treated as if they really exist. North places his own work among the critics, but from his travels through the various methodological communities he also identifies himself as a participant-observer whose visits into unfamiliar cultures yield up new understandings of his own experience. He writes, “Having conceived of these various communities as constituting the ‘society’ of Composition, and of each method—each mode of inquiry—as the subculture of one or another of them, I have tried here to make sense of what I have seen and done in my ten years of ‘living among’ the people of Composition: language and rituals, histories and mythologies, ontologies and epistemologies” (4).

Probably because he is aware of the inherent artificiality of his approach, North strengthens his hand by painstakingly delineating the “rules” for each form of inquiry. He identifies representative studies and analyzes the success and failings of each one—not, it seems to me, in a spirit of fault-finding, even though I’m sure many readers were relieved when their own work escaped North’s scrutiny, but more to set a standard, perhaps unattainable, of what pure research in that particular mode should look like. North’s overriding contention is that today’s composition studies have turned up an impressive accumulation of knowledge that is nevertheless imperiled by a lack of coherence and methodological integrity. His discussion becomes turgid at times because of its predictability: the background for the specific approach, the nature of its knowledge, an outline of the steps such inquiry follows, and a discussion of each step using selected studies.

However tiresome the discussion occasionally becomes, though, I admire North’s careful speculation, even when I sometimes disagree with his analysis. It seems to me that the book invites that kind of participatory reading. Steve North is a presence throughout the book, from the conversational tone and occasional quirkiness of his writing to his personal search for meaning in the field. He departs from the safe, scholarly tradition of detached, dispassionate neutrality to invite readers into his conversation about the meaning and value of our field. The spirited responses that North has evoked seem to me to have all the good qualities of our best seminars. Further, by personalizing each community as flesh and blood investigators, the book takes on some of the characteristics of a soap opera—or a morality play. In a graduate seminar last winter, my class waited in suspense to see the virtues and vices of each of the characters exposed. My students were sure the ethnographers would turn out to be the good guys, since North saved them for last. But their emergence simply as the least flawed puts them closer to characters in L.A. Law than those in Dallas.

The second purpose of the book explains this dark vision. The book is as much about the politics of composition as it is about its epistemology. North characterizes the growth of contemporary composition as a land rush into virgin territory with the traditional displacement of those who were there first, in this case the classroom teachers: “The whole thrust of the academic reform movement was to remove authority over knowledge from the hands of those whose main source of such authority was their practice” (21). North argues that the new settlers succeeded in disenfranchising the native population by assigning them the status of technicians and their knowledge to the stature of lore, dependent largely on the folksy traditions of ritual and oral transmission for dissemination.

Beyond the book’s careful study of the currently respectable means of generating knowledge, it is also a plea for the restoration of practice as a means of inquiry and lore as a viable source of knowledge. Practitioners, North argues, “have been responsible for Composition holding together as long as it has. . . . What is required here, however, as the basis for a transformed Composition, is a full recognition of and appreciation for lore: an understanding of what it is and how it works such that other kinds of knowledge can usefully interact with it” (371). North’s prognostications strike a responsive chord with practitioners who—rightly, I think—understand the enduring importance of serious composition pedagogy to education. So many reviews of North’s book have been written by those of us who are part of the landrush that I thought it would be useful to hear from the other camp. Here, a junior high English teacher sums up her reading of the book:

Although a good deal of her anger is directed toward North’s portrayal of practitioners, this teacher also recognizes that North is really just the messenger. For readers in this community, the intertribal squabbles among the various researchers and scholars matter less than the future of a field that teachers see assaulted by shrinking public school budgets, overcrowded classrooms, and ill-conceived curricula. Although the book has many merits, its real contribution rests in its challenge to find ways for composition theory and practice to work together, because only by resolving the differences that keep the field fragmented will composition sustain itself in the face of the next educational crisis.