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Canon as Palimpsest: Composition
Studies, Genre Theory, and the
Discourses of the Humanities
David Brauer
P
rofession 2005
begins with a series of essays titled "The Future of the
Humanities." Without exception, the authors contend that literary stud-
ies must reaffirm, or in some cases reassert, its connection with the hu-
manities in order to retain viability for the foreseeable and distant future in
American higher education. In the words of Robert Scholes, the humanities
serve to "[remind] us that we have a responsibility to the great works of
the past and to those students who may benefit from coming to know and
appreciate them" (9). While they stop short of proclaiming that primary
texts of literature would share the level of "first order discourse" that many
in English Studies afford to theory, these voices insist that the humanities
must remain viable in higher education and that we must emphasize them
in our scholarship, our teaching, and even in our evaluations for tenure
and promotion. They offer no long-term prescriptions as to the curricular
or scholarly formulation of the humanities in the contemporary university,
but they do set the table for such reflection and discussion.^
In this essay I hope to augment the critical reflection on these matters
with a focus on their implications for Composition Studies. Even though
many scholars in this field have distanced themselves from literary studies,
and not without good rationale and fair-minded intentions, our discipline
may benefit ñ"om cultivating a relationship with the meta-discipline of the
humanities. When viewed as a set of interacting, historically contexualized
discourses, the humanities offers a focus of inquiry that is more broadly
contoured, more open to revision, and more critically accessible than has
been recognized by many voices eager for a more autonomous definition of
Composition Studies. Once I have contextualized this point in reference to
some notable voices in the discipline, I will then incorporate genre theory in
order to foster a connection between Composition Studies and the humani-
ties. Thus, I hope to answer the call of the essayists mentioned above and in
so doing enhance the positions of both fields of academic inquiry.
The recent calls for increased pragmatism in pedagogies and curriculum
revision by the likes of Kathleen Blake Yancey and Kurt Spellmeyer would
seem to offer Composition Studies a decisive identity and direction for future
scholarship and presence in the academy. In her 2004 CCCC Chair Address,
Yancey gives most of her attention to what she terms a new "writing pub-
lic," a population for whom writing happens primarily outside the academy.
Instead of rhetoric, argumentation, or even academic literacy, Yancey offers
Composition Smdies
37.2 (2009) / ISSN 1534-9322
competing definitions of public literacy and the impact of new technolo-
gies of writing as the emerging focus for Composition Studies. While her
discursive context is an academic one, she acknowledges that the writing
that commands the attention of composition professors "seems to operate in
an economy driven by use value" (301). She suggests that we adapt to this
new discursive/linguistic context by changing our curriculum so as to train
students to write and translate across multiple mediums, textual, electronic,
public, and so on.^ The pragmatism exemplified here would allow the dis-
cipline to connect classroom work to real-world emplojmient concerns and
writing contexts, thus signaling a potentially decisive break with both the
formalism and modes-based writing pedagogies of an earlier era and the
expressivist pedagogies of recent decades.
Yance^s vision offers valuable ways to proliferate the loci of composi-
tion studies, and the opportunities articulated in her address offer hope for
new avenues of critical inquiry and pedagogical development. For all of her
apparent expansiveness, though, she neglects the aesthetic and imaginative
aspects of rhetorical inquiry and analysis that would complement her more
pragmatic ideas. If in fact Composition Studies should pursue a public aca-
demic language (see Yancey; Brooks; Gorzelsky), we should remind ourselves
that the aesthetic offers a meaningful point of entry into the semiotic and
epistemological concerns of our discipline. I contend that a renewed focus on
the humanities as a historically situated, rhetorically understood endeavor
would bolster the institutional position and curricular role of Composition
Studies and would provide for a helpful balance to the aforementioned
pragmatic turn in much of our scholarship.
While many see this turn of events as a welcome liberation from the more
idealistic concerns of literary studies, others have taken note of unintended
consequences for our profession. In his book Arts
of Living
Kurt Spellmeyer
offers a wide-ranging analysis of the state of the humanities in the current
academy.^ He begins his broadly-focused critique by stating the obvious:
the humanities finds itself isolated from the activities and concerns of the
larger society (4). Though he mentions the predictable sociological factors,
including the rise of technology and the increasing pragmatism of students'
attitudes toward higher education, Spellmeyer blames higher education it-
self, arguing that "the academic humanities . . . [has created] a specialized,
often rarified knowledge that justifies not only the privileged vantage point
of critical judgment, but tenured positions, research stipends, federal grants,
and so on" (6). Instead of encouraging a "direct involvement in the making
of culture" (7), the humanities has removed it to a near vanishing point, with
unintended consequences for the most basic and most culturally meaningful
practices of higher education. Rather than empowering students and, by
extension, citizens, the humanities too often removes them from creative
and intellectual means of understanding and improving their world.
10
Composition Studies
In the concluding pages of his discussion, Spellmeyer attempts to
link Composition to the humanities through a new core curriculum based
on dialogue, creative investigation, and issues in current culture. While
these suggestions do help us to consider innovative means to making the .
humanities relevant, they lack two key components. Throughout the many
pages of a text dedicated to the humanities and its relevance, Spellmeyer
never provides a definition of this key term beyond echoing some of the
phrasings of Robert Bellah.'' As such, we are to see the humanities as a
term emptied of meaning yet endlessly contested, simultaneously tradi-
tional in reflecting our most trite assumptions about it and progressive in
its possibilities. He does take a moment to exclaim that
[a] s for . . . professors, we continue to believe—or at least to claim—that
a knowledge of Plato, a reading of Shakespeare, a brush with current his-
toriography, an immersion in possible worlds theory . . . will somehow
enable young Americans to make better decisions than if they had more
pertinent information at their ready command. As far as I'm concerned,
this is the sheerest superstition. (244)
Spellmeyer's point here rests upon a relatively clear distinction between ev-
eryday (i.e. "pertinent") genres and the humanities, the latter of which is a
set of genres deemed too remote or impractical to serve "young Americans."^
But this distinction ignores the innately dialogical character of public dis-
courses whereby boundaries between "high brow" and "low brow" texts may
be conceptualized but not easily maintained. While knowledge of so-called
classic texts may often prove too antiseptic and credulous for its own good,
Spellmeyer seems quick to jettison certain discourses in favor of others; thus,
he evokes a hierarchical conception of cultural knowledge that does not nec-
essarily account for the dynamic interplay among aesthetics, rhetoric, and
utilitarianism that we recognize in the genres that we use.
In a move reminiscent of Gerald Graff and many others who attempt to
properly historicize modern English Studies, Spellmeyer's institutional and
intellectual history goes back only to the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury.^ His bias toward the contemporary and the pragmatic reduces context
(cultural, institutional, ideological) to the concerns of the moment and to an
unforeseeable future, implicitly rendering Composition as a discipline that
is isolated from History and Philosophy rather than open to their influence.
In the curriculum that Spellmeyer champions and describes, the courses
are designed not around texts but around "'dialogues/" inquiries based on
"the problems that college graduates might be expected to face in the next
twenty years or so, not as doctors or lawyers or Indian chiefs, but as ordi-
nary citizens" (242). Intriguingly, Spellmeyer references a common cultural
subject position, "ordinary citizens," but his strategy begs a question: are
ordinary citizens (if such a subject position even exists) always informed
Canon as Palimpsest 11
and determined merely by ordinary, pragmatic discourses in which they
participate frequently?^ The dialogues in question seem relatively flexible
and open-ended, but the context and exigencies are thin, driven more by
newspaper headlines than by the interplay of disciplinary inquiry. While his
pedagogical vision is attractive, his view of public genres seems narrowly
f^ocused on current, utilitarian discourses.
Spellmeyer's attitude toward Plato and Shakespeare is emblematic of
our profession: in spite of our improved status as a discipline, our embedded
subject position within the academy ensures a tortured relationship with the
intellectual and artistic conversations that have defined us and provided us
with cultural capital to this point and will likely continue to do so. Though
I concur with Louis Menand that we should not use the humanities as a
means of propping up dominant cultural hegemonies (16), I do not agree
that a reinvestigation of the humanities both as an admittedly open canon of
texts and as evolving cultural practice would indicate that we have somehow
lost our ideological nerve. Bruce Kimball defines a contemporary academic
manifestation of
artes liberales
as "prescribing the reading of classical texts
primarily in order to develop critical intellect" (219), a definition that does
not emphasize writing but does generally align with the liberatory pedago-
gies of English Studies. Karen Fitts and William Lalicker have called for a
"symbiosis" between composition and literature as enabling a "reconstitution"
of the curriculum (428). Their scholarship challenges the binary opposition
between the twofields,but their focus on disciplinary hierarchies limits their
attention to pedagogy. Building on their argument, though, I look to voices
from within the academy but outside the traditional discursive
terra firma
of scholarship in English Studies.
Robert Proctor's
Defining the Humanities
had its initial publication date
over a decade before Spellmeyer's
Arts of Living,
yet the former anticipates
the latter and its own internal problems in uncanny ways. Whereas the
latter proves an exercise in epideictic rhetoric, the former offers sustained
deliberative rhetoric in its most important passages.^ A professor of Italian
literature and language. Proctor begins his text by acknowledging openly
what traditionalists seem loathe to admit, that the "humanities" as a term has
been emptied out, not merely by specialization in the disciplines and persis-
tent anxieties about tradition in higher education but also resulting from a
break with the Greco-Roman tradition in the West fomented by Renaissance
humanists. Bruce Kimball argues that the ongoing disagreement about what
constitutes a humanities-based education stems from a millennia-old conflict
between orators, who favor education based on its perceived intrinsic value,
and philosophers, who favor education based on its perceived use value.'
Proctor attempts to break this impasse by offering a realistic accounting of
the intellectual history of the West that reveals not continuity but disjunction;
paradigmatic shifts in epistemological, religious, and cultural assumptions
12
Composition Studies
have proven the norm over the last two millennia rather than the excep-
tion. Rather than imitate conservatives in romanticizing the past or imitate
progressives in relativizing it. Proctor suggests a third possibility:
The tradition of classical education, which began in the Renaissance and
flourished in Europe and America until the end of the last century, is gone
now. How should we react to the death of this tradition? We can either
mourn it and try to hold on to it, or we can see its passing as a liberation
and as an opportunity for us to appropriate the past in new ways. I prefer
the latter, (xxviii)
Another reprisal of the Great Books approach to general education
pace
Allan Bloom and William Bennett will not do. That approach assumes,
quite falsely, that texts from the past speak plainly and unproblematically
to contemporary readers. Proctor explains: "[The Great Books approach to
education] encourages students to think that they can read Homer with
the same frame of mind that they read Tolstoy or Shakespeare because all
great writers, no matter when they lived and wrote, were struggling with
the same basic questions. They weren't" (192). While Proctor ascribes to
a predictable reading list as embodjdng the building blocks of a humani-
ties canon, he also emphasizes the historicity of texts in ways familiar to
scholars in English Studies and Rhetoric and Composition. Proctor sees
texts as historically-determined and responsive to exigencies, deriving from
particular assumptions and serving specific cultural roles. They are not sim-
ply declarative or artistic statements to be accepted without question or
critique but are symbolic actions that serve rhetorical and epistemic ends,
allowing the audience to negotiate the interplay of mundane, abstract, and
even traumatic experiences.
In developing his main critique of contemporary approaches to the
humanities. Proctor asserts that methodology has become an end in itself to
such a degree that debate over pedagogy has all but eclipsed any sustained
questions of content choices and textual reception. His solution? More
attention to hermeneutics, historical context, and the contingent, variant
strategies of approaching the same questions and problems in different eras
will help to provide balance and more imaginative possibilities for research
and pedagogical praxis. Such engagement of a historical and discursive
Other will offer a context for understanding our own hermeneutical idio-
syncrasies and blind spots
vis-à-vis
texts from the past. In Proctor's words:
"The whole point of studying the history of the humanities is to arrive at
an understanding of this deterioration which will permit us to see why
we can no longer read and teach the ancients the way our ancestors did"
(173). His definition of the liberal arts will likely prove a bit narrow for
those associated with English departments, as he focuses on the works of
Greeks and Romans exclusive of the tradition of literature written in the
Canon as Palimpsest 13

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