I was reading through some of the Enculturation articles, and I couldn’t seem to get the Sharon Crowley idea out of my head that, “[The] history of close ties between rhetoric and composition ended in the late-nineteenth century… when ‘composition’ acquired a new meaning and a new praxis… given it by the Arnoldian humanists who invented the first-year requirement…”
That’s giving a lot of power to one mid-nineteenth century critic and those who would choose to follow. Or, in Crowley’s words, those who would “kill off the vestiges of rhetorical study that remained in American colleges at the time.” Why is “kill off the vestiges of” her preferred word choice? Why not “changed” or “overshadowed” the former methods of rhetorical study? Why give your enemies the power to take down the classical rhetoricians? And they are, clearly, her enemies. But she isn’t a rhetorical purist, either, falling back on the work of Charles Sears Baldwin, a late nineteenth early twentieth century rhetorician, in lieu of the ancient Greek or Roman writers.
It seems as though she is less concerned with the general removal of rhetoric from composition, and more concerned with the resulting methodology. Sounds like a legitimate concern to me, and by the end of her piece I can’t help but be on board, for the most part, with her argument, but I feel that there is still room for “intellectual sophistication” and rhetoric in my composition class.