1977. Brent Henze

site—Penn State’s University Park campus.3 That decision to study the developing drama of our field by narrowing sharply what Kenneth Burke would call the “circumference” of the scene under scrutiny has enabled us to discover how and why the field of composition was emerging as an intellectual, pedagogical, and professional practice at a particularly crucial moment.4 It also has given us an opportunity to recover in great detail—detail that is simply impossible to offer in a broader study—the conflicting and sometimes ephemeral currents that were part of the conversation about composition at a specific time. And this focus has permitted us to look at a host of related literacy initiatives—first-year composition, to be sure, but also professional and technical communication, writing across the curriculum, writing centers, creative writing—that have too frequently been considered separately.

      1977 also contributes to the growing body of scholarship on writing program administration. Studies of composition history are just beginning to pay significant attention to the historical development of particular writing programs and to the myriad administrative, institutional, and intellectual conflicts and decisions that shaped those programs. Study of the material traces and archival documents of writing program development, Shirley K. Rose suggests, is a fundamental part of ongoing scholarly efforts to theorize writing program administration. Rich historical detail—preserved through archival materials and the historical narratives assembled from them—“will be useful for constructing a theoretical model of writing program development” (110). Publishing writing program histories, Barbara L’Eplattenier notes, “is both validation of contemporary scholarship and a logical extension of the contemporary work that has led to the recognition of writing program administration as a scholarly endeavor” (136). At the current moment, however, the historical details necessary for the telling of effective writing program histories are often missing or incomplete: many writing programs (as Rose notes) have no structure for archiving records, and a motive for archiving such materials has been missing because histories of specific programs are not yet recognized in traditional scholarly venues for publication. This book consequently addresses this gap by supplying a close historical examination of a specific writing program and its practices. Further, the book incorporates the kinds of program materials—memos, interviews, textbooks, institutional reports—that Rose identifies as essential to ongoing efforts to document and validate the intellectual work of writing program administration.

      To help uncover the conflicting and sometimes ephemeral currents within a particular writing program site, we addressed several key questions, questions that both rely upon and extend the work of previous composition histories:

      • How do local cultural, political, and economic conditions affect the ways in which theories of composition are manifested in local classrooms?

      • To what degree and to what ends does scholarship in composition influence practices in particular writing programs?

      • How do national and international affairs affect writing program development?

      • How are curricular designs in composition at specific institutions influenced by the assumptions and beliefs of particular faculty members and administrators?

      • How have composition programs in place today developed out of the foundational efforts of critical scholars, administrators, and teachers of the 1970s?

      In exploring these questions we focus on a single site and year not because we feel they are the most representative time and topography (though, in retrospect, the year and site now seem to us as representative as anything could be within the diversity of practices known as composition—and seem to offer as well an unusually rich moment and place to reflect upon); nor are we unaware of the limitations of this kind of localized study (our strengths—specificity and depth—are at the expense of breadth). Rather, our concentration on a specific time and topography offers us an opportunity to give an unusually thick, inclusive and instructive description of things in a way that will fill out other histories of the period and that will provide perspective on the present. It also gives us a chance to acknowledge institutional considerations that shape programs and courses, to appreciate the interconnections among instructional efforts like professional writing and composition, and, perhaps most important, to attend to marginal voices and short-lived but instructive developments.

      Since we are committed to the complementary propositions that specific circumstances can be explained in part by larger movements and that larger phenomena can be understood through a comprehension of local situations, we have maintained a continuing dialogue between the local and particular, on the one hand, and the broad and general, on the other: we consistently poise an account of developments at Penn State against national and disciplinary developments. Thus, besides offering a perspective on pedagogical practices, past and present, this essay contributes significant, instructive detail to the broad narratives laid out by Berlin, Crowley, Faigley, Harris, Miller, and others even as it offers an additional and telling account of a particular site of composition instruction that is in the tradition of Varnum’s study of Amherst College in Fencing with Words, Campbell’s study of Radcliffe in “Controlling Voices,” Hollis’s account of the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, Simmons’s description of Barrett Wendell’s pedagogy at Harvard, Gere’s study of local sites of literacy formation in Intimate Practices, Crowley’s analysis of the University of Iowa in Composition in the University , and the localized research included in L’Eplattenier and Mastrangelo’s Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration 5—historical studies that continue to reflect and identify what writing instruction is as much as what it has been.

      2 Background I: The Cultural Scene in 1977

      Elvis Presley died on August 16, 1977; in the same month the Holly­wood film Star Wars was released to record crowds. In retrospect it is easy (probably all too easy) to read the two events as twin signs of the psychic and material stresses that seemed endemic to American life in 1977. Elvis’s death denotes for us now yet another endpoint to the 1960s. Elvis and his once-promising era having degenerated together by 1977 into a rather bloated, drug-stupefied, generally aimless, perceptibly aging, terminally ill shell of a decade now come to ruin: the hopeful and revolutionary counter-culture he in some respects represented having been commodified into cynical Las Vegas glitz. Writing in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock ‘n’ Roll a year before Elvis’s death, music critic Peter Graining bemoaned the physical, mental, and moral decline of The King—a decline that seemed to mirror the political and cultural stagnation of the time:

      His hair is dyed, his teeth are capped, his middle is girdled, his voice is a husk, and his eyes film over with glassy impersonality. He [. . .] cannot endure the scorn of strangers, [and] will not go out if his hair isn’t right, if his weight—which fluctuates wildly—is not down. He has tantrums onstage and, like some aging politician, is reduced to the ranks of grotesque. (qtd in Rohter and Zito)

      Shortly after Elvis’s death, Esquire painfully juxtaposed the glamour of his public appearance with the physical and psychic degeneration of his person and period: he “occasionally wore dark glasses with ELVIS spelled out on the sides in diamonds [. . . and] owned a gold lamé suit that weighed more than twenty pounds,” even though he actually hated the suit, suffered from glaucoma and colitis, and, in recent fits of temper, “was known to smash up television sets and pool tables” (Bradshaw 97). Star Wars, meantime, in its characters, setting, and plot nostalgically looked backward to the 1960s. Luke Skywalker, his friends and their adventures provided the wistful cinematic reenactment of a lost children’s crusade, flower-powered and anti-establishment (Woodstock Nation This Time Victorious), even as the film offered in Darth Vader the menacing specter of politically conservative forces already poised to sweep out 1960s’ liberalism, optimism, prosperity, and interest in social justice. Together the two cultural events testify (if superficially, we know) to how by 1977 the hopes of the previous decade had come mostly to lost promise if not to a sense of outright waste and failure, even to a sense of cultural exhaustion, crisis, and anxiety.

      For anxieties there were aplenty in 1977. (For that reason, we should perhaps be using Woody Allen’s all-about-anxiety movie Annie Hall as the prototypical 1977 cultural artifact, not Star Wars.) Political events were still shadowed by the specter of the Watergate era and the