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Two subfields bucked the trend in decreasing enrollments. One was creative writing, which maintained steady enrollments and faculty appointments at many colleges and universities. But despite strong interest in their courses, creative writers were nevertheless struggling intellectually over the relative merits of alternative pedagogies. The Associated Writing Programs (the creative writing equivalent of the MLA or CCCC) categorized the nation’s creative writing programs in their annual catalogue based on each institution’s emphasis on writing. The three categories as defined by AWP were Studio (featuring a central focus on student writing practice), Studio/Academic (emphasizing equally both writing and literature), and Traditional Literary Study and Creative Writing (offering central focus on mastery of literature). Though a preference was not explicitly stated in the catalogue, the AWP’s discussions of the three different types leaned in the direction of the studio method (AWP Catalogue 1–6). Throughout the decade, within creative writing the reading component lost ground to writing, based on the craft-centered workshop model made famous by the University of Iowa. According to that model, the “writer” (as an unproblematized, unitary, relatively autonomous consciousness) and the products of that writer remained at the center of the curriculum and the classroom. The utility of literature courses in the education of creative writers was debated throughout the decade.
The other growth area in English studies, of course, was composition and related enterprises like technical writing and business writing. Virtually all English departments experienced growth in composition courses during the 1970s, usually substantial growth. But as numbers increased in composition courses, public outcry over student writing deficiencies also forcibly tested the validity of prevailing approaches to composition instruction. Students, on the whole and on the average, were less skilled in 1977 than their predecessors, according to the available measurement tools. Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores for incoming freshmen continued along a fifteen-year slide as more and more high school graduates took the tests in preparation for college admission. Between 1977 and 1978 alone, average scores on the SAT at Penn State dropped 21 points. Over 25 percent of incoming freshmen at Penn State now tested as deficient in basic English skills and required remedial English instruction (Unsigned article). Meanwhile, the new open admissions policies of junior and community colleges were perpetuating the need for remedial composition. When CUNY began open admissions in New York, questions arose throughout academia concerning the very role of a university education in American culture, and remediation—especially in the area of composition—swiftly became a national priority for universities struggling to maintain their enrollment numbers. As the population of what would be considered traditional college students declined in general, student enrollment figures were maintained through a new student population—one that was believed to be in need of remedial help.
The call for remediation coincided with, if not outright triggered, the perceived need to emphasize and overhaul the teaching of English composition on most university campuses. Newsweek’s publication of the cover story “Why Johnny Can’t Write” in December of 1975 hammered home the case for sweeping reform and for a “back-to-basics” approach to writing instruction. In assaults from the public media, just about everyone was to blame—television, parents, teachers, universities, and methods of testing. Academic discourse on the issue surfaced in professional journals, university publications, and faculty bulletins; fluency versus correctness, speech idioms versus written idioms, and the value of literature versus rhetorical constructs were among the most prevalent topics of debate. Whatever the cause of the perceived decline in writing ability (and in retrospect it seems apparent that the “decline” was really a manifestation of the expansion of the student body), students, employers, deans, and the media had grown alarmed and moved to correct what they thought was wrong with composition. Out of that weighty tasking, the discipline of rhetoric and composition became professionalized as never before. Reaction in the field to “Why Johnny Can’t Write” solidified the existing sense of urgency and became the principle justification for reform. The prevailing responses to the article identified a need to promote literacy by increasing attentiveness to remediation, process, and individualized curricula.12
While composition was becoming the center of public and professional controversy, English as a discipline also seemed to be in crisis and transition. Although traditional literary scholarship retained much of its prestige in the field—close readings of canonical works remained a staple of PMLA and other flagship journals, and E. D. Hirsch’s brilliant books on critical theory maintained many traditional theoretical assumptions—it was nevertheless becoming clear that the New Criticism was showing serious signs of age and incompetence, and that the days were numbered when a stable canon of literary works could continue to provide the basis for English studies. The problem was that no one knew quite what to do instead of New Criticism and the study of canonical works. Semiotic, structuralist, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic approaches to literary texts were prominent in the late 1960s and into the 1970s (Umberto Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics appeared in 1976, for instance), but most scholars nevertheless remained unengaged and even confused by these critical schools. Beginning in the mid-1970s there was a move away from structuralism toward deconstruction, on the one hand, and more social forms of criticism, on the other. While Jacques Derrida had appeared at the Johns Hopkins conference on structuralism as early as 1966, his works remained untranslated and rather obscure until 1973, when Speech and Phenomena appeared in English and deconstruction began to emerge as a major subject for debate. Derrida’s Of Grammatology was translated in 1976, and Paul de Man’s essays (many of them collected in his 1979 book Allegories of Reading) began to domesticate Derridean thought. Other Continental theorists were simultaneously taking scholarship away from textual dynamics and toward a consideration of readers and their social contexts. Roland Barthes proclaimed “the death of the author” in his 1977 Image—Music—Text; Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser were contributing reception theory and reader-response to the American theory wars; and Stanley Fish, Norman Holland, David Bleich, and others (many of them collected in Jane Tompkins’s 1980 book, Reader-Response Criticism) picked up on audience-centered criticism and developed it in novel, stimulating, and controversial ways. Fredric Jameson’s neo-Marxist criticism (e.g., Marxism and Form, 1971) gained adherents and allies, among them Frank Lentricchia, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak; J. A. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, the seminal text on speech-act theory, appeared in 1975; and Michel Foucault’s English publication of Discipline and Punish (1977) and Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings, 1972–1977 was beginning to refocus attention on the conditions of textual production within culture. Similarly, feminists such as Judith Fetterley (The Resisting Reader, 1978), Elaine Showalter (A Literature of Their Own, 1977), Nina Baym (Women’s Fiction, 1978), and others were redirecting attention to women writers, talking about reading from a gendered position, and in other ways inventing a critical position that would prosper in spite of controversy for years. During the 1970s, literally hundreds of colleges and universities began women’s studies programs. As women writers entered the canon or coexisted alongside it, the canon itself became undermined as a stable given of English departments. Thus, new writers and kinds of writing entered the discipline as objects of study and the essays of theorists themselves seemed to be making a strong, if ironic, bid for canonicity, challenging distinctions between “primary” and “secondary” texts, and “literature” and “theory.” Was theory offering new frameworks for the study of literature and language, or was it just another subdiscipline? Were English professors now expected to neglect literary texts in favor of theory? Was it necessary, in the light of new theoretical approaches and canon revision, to redesign the English curriculum?
In one sense, of course, all of this intellectual activity was invigorating, and the rebirth of English studies that is evident in the healthy discipline of today might be understood as beginning with the ferment of the 1970s. Wayne Booth’s plea for tolerance and pluralism in his 1979 Critical Understanding: The Power and Limits of Pluralism demonstrated that new developments were not necessarily the sign that the barbarians were at the gates. But at the time, the turmoil did paralyze a great many teachers of English, many of whom seemed at odds with one another. “As a profession we are today so diversified in our interests—one might say