Composition and rhetoric professors do yeoman’s work in English departments, teaching nuts-and-bolts classes to undergraduates. Writing studies as a research discipline has also taken off, as scholars investigate digital communication, political and environmental rhetoric, and other examples of writing as a social and cultural phenomenon.
All that work hasn’t made writing specialists feel like their natural home is the Modern Language Association, the leading professional association for language and literature. Instead, many of them gravitate toward the Conference on College Composition and Communication or another, smaller meeting focused on their particular interests.
The association, though, has been showing signs that it wants to make them feel more included. The most recent indication came last week, when the group announced the nominees for its 2015 elections, to be held late this year. (The nominating committee is elected by the association’s Delegate Assembly and includes junior and senior scholars; according to the bylaws, every other year, including this year, the vice-presidential nominees must be from the field of English.)
The nominees include three high-profile writing-studies scholars: Michael F. Bernard-Donals, a professor of English and Jewish studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison; Anne Ruggles Gere, a professor of English at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; and Keith Gilyard, a professor of English and African-American studies at Pennsylvania State University. They’re all running for the job of second vice president of the association. While that doesn’t sound like a hugely influential role, whoever wins it will eventually rotate into the top job.
“The 2018 president will be a scholar in the field of rhetoric and composition, which is one of the most vital fields under the large umbrella we call the Modern Language Association,” said Rosemary G. Feal, the group’s executive director.
Ms. Feal has heard from rhetoric-and-composition scholars that the association needs to do a better job of representing them. The more they get involved, “the more influence they will have,” she said.
Being sidelined by colleagues isn’t the only challenge for those scholars. “A lot of adjunct work is done by composition instructors,” said Mr. Gilyard, one of the nominees. “In many ways it’s been a work-force issue.”
Literary studies has ruled the day for a long time, but the association has a longer involvement with writing studies than it sometimes gets credit for, he said. It’s a legacy that dates as far back as a late-19th-century MLA president, Fred Newton Scott, a prominent scholar of rhetoric and composition. This year’s slate of candidates “speaks to the resurgence of writing studies within the broader community of literary studies,” Mr. Gilyard said.
Marc Bousquet, an associate professor of English at Emory University, said the 2015 slate sends a signal to English departments that writing studies counts as a research discipline. “This recognition is perhaps the most important outcome of these nominations.”
He pointed out that writing-studies graduate students and faculty members have also been involved in recent activism aimed at the association, such as the MLA Democracy movement, which describes itself as a “spontaneous movement that aims to place activists into MLA governance.”
Jobs and Representation
The association has a very practical reason to court the composition-and-rhetoric contingent: Even with the rise of adjunct labor, writing-studies professors enjoy much brighter job prospects than their literature-focused colleagues. That makes them a potentially powerful constituency.
“The numbers are quite clear that there are more tenure-track research jobs in rhetoric and composition than there are in English or American literature, and that’s been true for a long time,” said Mr. Bousquet.
In 2012, Jim Ridolfo, an assistant professor of writing, rhetoric, and digital studies at the University of Kentucky, started to do something the MLA was not doing: a regular count of jobs listed in composition and rhetoric. He posts them on a website, rhetmap.org, and shares job roundups regularly on Twitter.
He’s found more than 300 listings so far this year, many of them multiple hires. “That’s a really significant percentage of the job market,” Mr. Ridolfo said. “To be totally blunt, I think that MLA is starting to realize that there’s a huge percentage of jobs advertised with them, and we’re not receiving the same professional services” — being included in state-of-the-profession reports, for instance. “Traditionally we haven’t had the representation that I think we deserve as a discipline at the MLA table.”
The nominations appear to be part of an attempt to change that. Ann Marie Rasmussen, a professor of German and Slavic studies at the University of Waterloo, led the nominating committee that put Mr. Bernard-Donals, Ms. Gere, and Mr. Gilyard on the ballot. The deliberations are confidential, she said, but the fact that the three nominees all have a specialty in rhetoric is no accident.
Composition and rhetoric are “central to what the MLA does,” Ms. Rasmussen said. “It’s a huge part of English departments everywhere.”
The association “has been making a fairly visible effort” lately to show that it takes the field seriously, according to Alex Reid. He’s an associate professor of English and the director of composition and teaching fellows at the University at Buffalo, a State University of New York campus. Among other promising signs, the association scheduled more writing-focused panels at its annual meeting and reorganized its member forums to better accommodate writing-studies specialists.
It could be, Mr. Reid said, that the association views them as “a largely untapped market for members” — or, “to put a more generous spin on, that MLA wants to reflect what English departments are like.”
Spencer Schaffner, an associate professor of English and writing studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, used to belong to the association but let his membership lapse in recent years. He’s not on the job market right now, and the CCCC and smaller, more targeted meetings have had more to offer him. “The MLA just hasn’t been a professional organization that I said, ‘Hey, this speaks to me.’”
Will having a senior scholar in his field as president alter that? “It could be a pretty important change,” Mr. Schaffner said. “Could be. It’s still a big organization.”
Jennifer Howard writes about research in the humanities, publishing, and other topics. Follow her on Twitter @JenHoward, or email her at jennifer.howard@chronicle.com.
