Why College English?
Author(s): Shirley Wilson Logan
Source: College English , Nov., 2006, Vol. 69, No. 2 (Nov., 2006), pp. 107-110
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
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107
Symposium: What Should College English Be?
Why College English?
Shirley Wilson Logan
In what we write, and perhaps even more in what we teach, we make the society in which we
shall continue to remake ourselves.
?Wayne Booth, The Vocation of a Teacher, p. 75
What do we want students to know, what skills do we want them to have after
completing a series of courses in college English? College English ought to
provide students with certain communicative skills that enable them to ana
lyze rhetorical effect and produce rhetorically effective texts, including those
to be read, those to be viewed as images, those to be heard, and those not to be
heard. Especially exciting is the expanding body of knowledge centered on visual,
aural, and silent texts. Within the past five years, new books on visual rhetoric, the
rhetoric of silence, and the rhetoric of listening have joined guides to analysis and
production of printed texts (see, e.g., Faigley et al.; Glenn; Ratcliffe). This trend
signals increasing recognition of the need to develop nondiscursive communication
skills, skills that college English should engage itself in perfecting. I use the term
"skills" unapologetically. Although many in English studies are uncomfortable with
the idea that we should teach skills?claiming instead that we teach texts or au
thors?I think it is just the right word. Ultimately what students remember about
Shirley Wilson Logan teaches composition, rhetoric, and African American literature at the University of
Maryland, College Park. She is editor of With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century
African-American Women and author of "We Are Coming": The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century
Black Women and essays in various collections. In addition to coeditdng the Southern Illinois University
Press series Rhetorics and Feminisms, she has served as head of CCCC, the Alliance of Rhetoric Societ
ies, and the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. She is complet
ing a book on black sites of rhetorical education.
College English, Volume 69, Number 2, November 2006
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108 College English
our courses, if they remember anything, is not author x or texty but how to under
stand and generate discourse.
I focus on these abilities because they are essential for meaningful civic engage
ment. College English is in the best position of all the academic disciplines to im
prove students' ability to engage with the defining texts of their lives, to connect text
and street. In an Introduction to Rhetorical Theory course I taught last fall during
the Katrina disaster, I sent my students to searching LexisNexis for articles from a
range of publications such as the Washington Post, the New Orleans Times-Picayune,
the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, and the Afro-American, to help them recognize the range of
argumentative perspectives surrounding this crisis. With the help of Sharon Crowley
and Debra Hawhee's Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, we considered how
articles and images constructed distinct versions of the storm's impact on people's
lives. College English, strategically centered on uses of language, must devote more
time to contemporary discourses and subsequently to the variety of ways in which
we can respond to them. For students just beginning to pay attention, analyzing a
range of arguments on an issue is an important first step toward influencing public
policy.
Linked to the exigence of critical engagement is the ability to communicate
across various dialectal communities. Our networked world has helped to reduce
the number of isolated communication exchanges and made it necessary to speak
more languages and understand more fully the dialectal nuances of our own, to
become multidialectal and multilingual. During a recent trip to Italy, I was reminded
of the ease with which many non-Americans shift between English and their home
languages, when a passenger on a Rome-to-Florence commuter train apologized for
her "poor" English during our conversation. Of course, I recognize that geography
facilitates this multilinguality and that, excluding the woman on the train, all my
interactions were with persons who make a living dealing with tourists. Still, I was
made more aware of my own limited ability to language-switch and found myself
wondering whether we could do a better job of promoting multilingualism and cre
ating opportunities to experience English as a foreign language with numerous dia
lects. The CCCC national language policy position statement some eight years ago
observed that "[W]e are a multilingual society"; the idea is not to overcome differ
ence but to function competently within it. While we pay lip service, in some en
lightened circles, to the idea of "students' rights to their own languages," we really
want students to know how to move across various power dialects in the name of
socioeconomic success. If we understand college English as that final preparation
for communication in the world beyond college (although I am uncomfortable with
this neat dichotomy), we need to teach students the value implications of standard
American written English. College English should sensitize writers and speakers to
the cultural implications of the communicative choices people make. Have them
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Why College English? 109
think about what it means to privilege a certain mode of speaking or writing. For
example, passages on the same subject written in different dialects of English placed
side by side could prompt a revealing discussion of appropriate modes and means of
conveying an idea. A course I taught in abolitionist rhetoric offered such a range of
texts as we looked at slave narratives, speeches, antislavery essays by Boston intellec
tuals, court cases, congressional debates, poetry, diary entries, song lyrics, and visual
representations. We must accept the truth that the linguistic and literary perspec
tives we promote are not value-free and expose the values embedded in our assump
tions about what modes of expressions are proper or what texts have literary merit.
Further, a discussion of college English must address the one English course
nearly every student takes, first-year writing, and it must address the preparation of
the graduate students who teach it at many large universities. In my university's
preparatory course, Approaches to College Composition, I still like to use Erika
Lindemann's Rhetoric for Writing Teachers, Joseph Harris's A Teaching Subject, and
Martha Kolln's Rhetorical Grammar, along with seminal essays of the field. Among
this population of recent college graduates, many eager to study literature or cre
ative writing, the notion of college English composition as correctness is firmly
embedded. Many exempted out of 101 at their undergraduate institutions and thus
have no direct experience of the course. The troubling issues surrounding their
placement in 101 classrooms notwithstanding, we must provide them with solid
preparation in the history and practice of rhetoric and composition, and in all atten
dant areas. What's important here is that conversations about the future of college
English cannot take place without a discussion of the labor elephant in the room.
Whatever the division of labor, we all teach reading and writing. We ought to
interrogate fully the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, white writers and
writers of color, and male and female writers, along with the other oppositional
categories into which English studies has organized itself. We must teach students
to read a range of visual and discursive texts, texts that convey an array of culture
bound experiences?and all experiences are culture-bound. We tend not to acknowl
edge that we are highlighting certain cultural practices when we teach a Henry James
novel as much as when we teach Their Eyes Were Watching God. The literature of
college English should reflect the creative expressions of those who constitute the
culture the literature intends to represent. For example, a course in U. S. literature
might start with the discursive expressions of indigenous people and then move to
the ways in which the productions of subsequent groups blended with and digressed
from them. This approach offers an alternative to teaching from a traditional an
thology, supplemented by multicultural readers.
One example from my own teaching is the hybrid text The Interesting Narrative
of the Life ofOlaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), which blurs sev
eral distinctions. It begins on the Guinea Coast of Africa and ends in England, with
portions unfolding in the United States, the Caribbean islands, and numerous other
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110 College English
locales. Equiano employs a range of rhetorical strategies in his arguments against
the slave trade. The work is part travel narrative, part conversion narrative; it in
cludes poetry and direct appeals to "Ye nominal Christians" as well as to Queen
Charlotte. I have used it in an introduction to African American literature course, as
well as in my course on the rhetoric of abolition, to demonstrate narrative as argu
ment. The debates concerning Equiano's birthplace and the accuracy of certain de
tails contribute significantly to recent debates on the "truth" requirements of
memoirs?sparked by the outcry over James Frey's A Million Little Pieces?and make
it even more interesting as a model of rhetorical performance.
Obviously, I could mine the "multicultural" anthologies on my bookshelf for
other examples, but doing so would seem to perpetuate the very practice I am argu
ing against. I suggest that we think less about what additional texts college English
should include, more about where we begin the selection process. This is not a new
point I'm making here. It's a question of whether we want to rethink the entire
endeavor and begin making difficult choices among so many possibilities the way
my father made cornbread?from scratch. I don't think we are anywhere near ready
to do this kind of reorganizing but my offering a list of lesser-known texts to include
would not shift the gaze. Instead it could very well leave the guardians of certain
"standard" texts looking on in Du Boisian "amused contempt," while progressives
debate the merits of all the rest.
My overriding concern, then, is that we continue to decenter, not remove, con
cepts that limit our understanding of college English to primarily the study of words,
the study of correctness, and the study of Eurocentric texts, and that we teach stu
dents of college English more intentionally how to analyze and deploy language and
images in ways that better prepare for meaningful civic engagement.
Works Cited
CCCC Position Statement on National Language Policy. Conference on College Compositi
Communication. Mar. 1998.9 May 2006 http://www.ncte.org/about/over/positions/category
107643 .htm?source=gs.
Crowley, Sharon, and Debra Hawhee. Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. 3rd ed. New
Longman, 2003.
Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. Rev. ed. Ed. Vincent Carre
York: Penguin, 2003.
Faigley, Lester, et al. Picturing Texts. New York: Norton, 2004.
Glenn, Cheryl. Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004.
Harris, Joseph. A Teaching Subject: Composition since 1966. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice, 1996
Kolln, Martha. Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects. 5th ed. New York: Lo
2006.
Lindemann, Erika. A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers. 4th ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2001.
Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP,
2006.
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