We Are All Boat People

I'm taking Cynthia Haynes up on her suggestion in the footnotes of "Writing Offshore". But before assigning this  origami-composition lesson to my students, I wanted to have some fun with it myself.

So with some 80's Glam Sharpies, I inscribed "We are all boat people" on the starboard side of my very own paper boat. And so it was christened.

In my trip to campus over the weekend to get some work done, I had my boat in tow. I left her carefully in one of the conference rooms in Heavilon, on one of the tables.

It is at these coordinates in our endeavor that Haynes gives us the most important command:

Then imagine [the boat's] trajectory, where it will go, who will see it, what they will think (what you would like them to think). And then, put that in writing; trace the trajectories, and give it ballast? So that the main questions you should ask yourself is this: WILL IT FLOAT? (718)

I can see another grad student coming in to his or her conference. Sitting down, this TA wonders what that piece of paper is on the table. Thinking of it as part of the flotsam that skirts classrooms and hallways - forgotten pencils, water bottles, paper, jackets, etc. - they may ignore it, or pick it up and set it aside somewhere it might collect dust. Or even in the recycling.

If not now, wouldn't it happen with the janitor?

Would the TA look at the writing? Would one of our freshmen?

The first trajectory is real-ish. We can look at yet another real-ish one. Suppose the TA does pick it up - my boat does after all have 80's Glam coloring on it. The boat halted this TA in her trajectory - whatever stream of thoughts she may have had, whatever plans she may have been conjuring, pause for a clear moment. Her focus narrows in on the boat, placed squarely in the center of the table demanding to be seen. "We are all boat people..." flashes across the screen of her mind, demanding response. Understanding. It may cause confusion. Interest. Brief feelings of bemusement.

And it makes her think of what it could all mean. Why is this boat, so clearly folded from paper and made lovingly, sitting here? What does "We are all boat people..." mean?

The TA may go as far as making it a statement of our existential nature. It means journey. Community. Universality. All symbolized in a boat.

It happens within moments. I don't know if the boat has set her on a new heading and if it can really change the matrix of Modernity and Individuality. Can it transcend time in her memories? Will she think on it later?

And what would students think? Their minds loaded with the latest Snapchats and Facebook posts and homework and friends and teachers and Twitter...Waiting patiently for their TA. What would a student think?

Am I stereotyping my audience?

Will it float?

***

I'm afraid this exercise only poses more questions than it can answer. Just as one movement of the moon makes millions of waves on the ocean's surface, so does the one statement, imprinted simply on the starboard side of my origami boat, give rise to wave after wave of queries and ideas. They are connected, but distinct. They carry movement from one domain of ideas into another. Imagination and scholarly pursuit combine in radical ways. In fact, they are hardly distinguishable. Writing offshore is to write without the impetus of knowing. Without the prerogative of determining one's fate in a sea of ideas. It is both freedom and enslavement - I am left to the caprice of any new "wave" if I am not anchored, yet my ideas can move in any heading I choose.

Writing offshore is the "doing" of scholarship, in some ways. I can only know if we will float if I actually depart. If I make my paper boat and leave argument to barnacles and sand. I can't conceptualize if we will float or not. This experiment was not enough - to really know, I would have to be present with the boat at all moments, be there to examine it in every instance and adjust my strategies to the infinite number of events that could happen to it. Even then, I can only write in retrospect.

To be offshore from rhetoric as it is now is truly departing all forms of scholarliness, perhaps. I need to abandon the slow movement of ideas which accrue through writing over time. Revising. Redrafting. It needs to be in the moment, so that new strategies and hard decisions form anew. Just as any captain works under constantly shifting circumstances, so would writing need to adjust to each new exigence on the spot, immediately.

It would take the courage of a captain, in short, to truly write offshore.

I don't feel sunken. Or defeated. Perhaps we floated after all.

The Lacuna

          Writing this WO was a personal exercise in searching for an unwritten story. I traveled through brilliant discussions of rhetorical sovereignty, literacies, and codices this past week.Villanueva, Lyons, and Baca gather threads from repositories of memory, history, and rhetoric to weave a narrative of "self". Whether they examine the rhetorical model of amoxtli or the sites of rhetorical sovereignty, they attempt to authentically represent the essential nature of their people and themselves. Lyons in "Rhetorical Sovereignty: What Do American Indians Want from Writing?" begins the essay with a story about the forced assimilation of Indians through boarding school. After exploring the meaning of the Western texts to those first students on that first day of school, Lyons asks the question at hand: "What do Indians want from writing? Certainly something other than the names of white men sewn to our backs" (449). Not only does Lyons move smoothly between this story of American Indians to the rhetorical question at hand, he does so with the confidence and dexterity of someone who firmly believes that the history of American Indians has a place in rhetorical study. Lyons then moves on to define "sovereignty" in terms of rhetoric and in terms of the history of American Indian treaties. The history of the term sovereignty in the American Indian context is necessary to understanding a rhetorically urgent query - where can a nation-people find rhetorical sovereignty not in terms of power relations and contracts, but as a method of self-preservation and cultural respect?  

          His confident moves in weaving this narrative does not only stem from an obvious principle that all people should have representation in the field; I think it also stems from the fact that other scholars have written about American Indians sufficiently enough for a conversation to even exist. It is true that "composition and rhetoric literature of the past few years shows a growing interest in American Indians and a general concern for including Native knowledges and voices in classrooms and curricula," and while Lyons  takes issue with the misrepresentations and cultural appropriations of George Kennedy and Bruce Ballenger in their writings about American Indians, he still has literature directly within the field he can work with in order to situate the article in context (458). Even further than that, Lyons has a rich source of American Indian history, which is documented and studied, on which he can rely to make his arguments.

          The reason why I highlight these qualities in Lyons' text is because I realized, after reading and rereading all the essays from this week trying to write my WO, why I felt slightly disconcerted. I will continue using Lyons as my example, though I emphasize that this feeling persisted with each of the texts. Despite being firmly on Lyon's side throughout his article - meaning, despite my strong belief in his cause and my empathy toward the plight of American Indians due to colonialism - I could not fully be on his side. What would happen if I were to write an article on American Indians in the future? Would I fall into that same category of privilege that Kennedy and Ballenger fall into for Lyons? I do not have that direct personal access to knowledge about American Indian history and culture that Lyons has; my affective interest in studying American Indians could never be on the same level as his affective interest. And my work toward writing about it may be misconstrued. Considering the fact that a majority of work on minority rhetorics is conducted from very personal points of view and from personal experience (that being a championed model of fighting oppression), it seems that writing about the experiences of minorities different from my own is an unlikely route for me to take as I pursue rhetorical study. 

          This brought me to my next question: if I cannot comfortably speak to the experience of other minorities within minority rhetorics, am I limited to exploring the rhetoric of South Asian Americans? Is this even a fair dilemma? As long as I observe the rhetorical urgencies and situations of minorities with an empathetic eye, could I still write about other minorities? I'm not sure I have the answers to these questions. I hope to figure this out eventually. 

          But I digress...I began by talking about unwritten stories. As I was thinking about South Asian Americans in rhetoric, I decided to do some digging and see what I could find in the field about Indians (the other kind, from India) and their rhetorics. 

There was almost nothing. 

          I could not find rhetoricians who took up the cause of exploring the Indian literacies and rhetorics in America. I found other articles, however, about health and sociological related phenomena on Indians; in other words, these articles which focused solely on Indians were in unrelated fields. And the focus was never truly on rhetoric or literacy, but about the racial/sociological/political/literary dynamic of the Indian diaspora in ways that were not rhetorically focused. These sources also did not give the sense that any thorough documentation of Indians in America even existed. Most resources were like The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience by Meena Alexander, which was written in 1951. The sources were outdated, or only focused on specific, centralized diasporic events or activities. Nothing comprehensive - nothing nearly like Lyons thorough overview of race relations between American Indians and white colonialists.

I tried searching for postcolonial and critical race theory, where there was some (but not much) literature. There is of course Can the Subaltern Speak? by Gayatri Spivak, but she recontextualizes outward to critique the behavior of all Western interactions with subalterns; her work is not about Indians really very particular, and not those in America. There is The Karma of Brown Folk (and other books) by Vijay Prashad, whom I did not know about (but now plan on studying). He was the only other major theorist. There was also a promising journal about South Asians called the South Asian Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ, which in Hindi means "society at large"); however, the journals focuses on Indians in India, and not diasporic Indians. My findings, in short, were haphazard and disjointed at best. No one had done the work of weaving them together.

          Considering the well-established (and growing) presence of Indians in America, it struck me as very, very odd that I could find so little on the subject specifically within rhetoric. This is likely the main source of my discomfort with the readings - I could not personally relate. I could only extrapolate, or situate myself alongside the readings; but I could not build a direct pathway, or engage within the readings. Lyons was convincing - but I was not reading something to which I could directly plug in my own experiences as a minority. On a basic level of difference, South Asian Indians don't seem to search for sovereignty like American Indians do. 

         Lyons writes within a network of shared and documented histories and conversations related directly to his people's experience in America. South Asian academics, the very few of us who are in the humanities, do not have that luxury. The work of building that kind of space just hasn't been done yet.

          There is an unwritten story here. Perhaps the study of South Asian rhetorics does not mean being confined; actually, serious work needs to be done. And, for the time being, if I should remain within certain comfortable boundaries of academic inquiry out of respect for other cultures, I'm not in such a bad place. Lyons, Baca, Villanueva, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and others all worked with what they knew best; they told the stories which made sense to them. 

It seems there's a fresh story to tell. I could be well-poised to tell it. 

Writer In Process

What does DeJoy mean when she says that we must move from "mastery to analysis" in "I'm a Process Model Baby"? What is her beef with "products," and how they work within process-model theories of composition? I dived into DeJoy with the unpleasant task of sifting through academic jargon to figure it out. 

A digression - I invite you to look at this sentence: 

"Another set of issues arises if we consider this configuration of product in relation to the equally widespread process-model ideology, which asserts that the model represents a recursive process, one in which any stage can, in theory, send us to any other stage of the writing process in infinitely unrestrained ways - although the demands of deadlines, due-dates, and other 'external' concerns may limit us in practice." 

This sentence was 5 lines long in the article. Why couldn't she just say that the other common idea she wants to highlight is the theory that each stage of the writing "process" could lead to other stages of that process, whether forward or backward? She also ended her sentence with an afterthought, and it moves away from her main point. I felt like I was drowning in her language throughout the article. Is it so hard to give-up formal academic writing in favor of clarity? 

Maybe asking for that is like asking an alcoholic to quit drinking cold turkey...

Just some thoughts.
End digression.

After floundering about between pages 166 and 168 for a while, I found a sandbar 0r two.

The first one:  

"The tangle becomes understandable if we consider that...'product' refers not only to a certain kind of text but also to a certain way of reading...what Louise Rosenblatt named the 'efferent stand,' one that 'makes reading...a process of deriving correct answers...an approach whose aim is not audience participation but audience persuasion" (166, emphasis added by me). 

DeJoy does not want readers to mutely master the texts - she wants readers to be situated as participants with the texts. Products are designed for consumption, not use, acquisition instead of action. If texts are designed like products, then audiences are presumed to have the blind faith of baby birds waiting for food to fall out of the sky. We sit here to be persuaded, to accept the answers given by texts.

But really quick...what does "efferent" mean, exactly? The Internet helped on this one...It's an anatomical term which refers to any vessel or carrier in the body that is bringing substance away from the center. It describes a conduit which flows -away- from the source. So the 'efferent stand' of reading products seems to say that the audience is outside the center, and the text conducts meaning from that locus to our hungry minds. 

So, I deduce that DeJoy wants to stop that one-way directional flow. She finds it problematic that audiences read and are persuaded - they do not read and analyze. We master texts, gobble them up. The movement needs to be from mastery to analysis.

Okay...how do we do that? 

Here's my second sandbar:

"The move from mastery to analysis is not just about dramatic changes in how we read; it is also about revaluing texts that put into question the claims of process-model theory and the activities for writing that they assert as universally applicable. It is about putting two texts such as Aristotle's Rhetoric and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own next to each other and asking questions such as 'In which text is a writer more overtly in process?' and 'In which text does process more overtly stand as a vital mode of production for the work of the author?' And it is about admitting that there are obvious ways in which we must respond that, at levels of analysis and practice, Woolf wins out (pp. 167, emphasis on the end added by me). 

She goes on to challenge us to compare Audre Lorde and Kinneavy to see who wins out in the process battle...but more on that later.

DeJoy is interested in having us read authors who are obviously in process. She does not agree with texts being structured as "products" for consumption.

But what does that look like? I have read A Room of One's Own and many texts by Audre Lorde, and the stark difference between those texts and say, Aristotle or Kinneavy, is indeed really obvious. I instinctually understand what DeJoy is getting at, especially when she mentions that we "learn little to nothing about Aristotle's or anyone else's process...Aristotle's Rhetoric positions mastery of the system itself and one's audiences as the end of writing, while Woolf discusses master as a physical place that is systematically made unavailable to specific parts of the population." (167). 

Perhaps I understand her even better when she says that writers like Kinneavy and Aristotle are using "systems where enthymemic logic, identification, and mastery of the advantages of preconstructed cultural assumptions rule over invention" (168). Their works muster that imperative to know, and to control knowledge. They want us to make certain assumptions. They depend on the logic of the age so that their audiences can learn their ideas by rote. We are left in the dark about the process by which they arrived at their conclusions. The blunt force trauma of mastery subdues all readers who grapple with those texts. I would argue DeJoy herself, with her heavy academic jargon and formality, similarly pushes audiences to be persuaded. 

In the spirit of DeJoy's challenge that we place Kinneavy alongside Lorde, I decided to conduct a litmus test to see if DeJoy still rang true after reading both authors.

A sample from Kinneavy's "Introduction to the Modes of Discourse":

     "This book is intended to be a sequel to Aims and Audiences in Writing. In the earlier book attention was given to the various purposes for which we write. The types of aims which control basic strategies of communication as well as organizational techniques and matters of style are considered in the earlier book. The authors hope that various adaptations of thinking processes, organizational patterns, and stylistic differentiations are called for if one attempts to persuade or inform or prove a thesis or convey information or make a poem, etc. One single blanket strategy cannot be applied to all indiscriminately."

BOOM. It's a product, through and through. He admits it himself! Sentence 1 - the book is a sequel, a product derived from another product. It is hoped that the book will be used to make more products - "to persuade or inform or prove a thesis or convey information..." The text is intended as a conduit conveying information to hungry readers so they may be persuaded (satiated?), and afterwards there will hopefully be more products which also persuade. I also see that he expects readers to master his text - how else would we make other products and texts from his? Furthermore, the text itself is a mastery of the discussion of modes in discourse; strong language, formal, with the author the autonomous bearer of knowledge, demonstrates that mastery. On both literacy and textual levels, then, Kinneavy is "product oriented". DeJoy's criticisms fall heavily on him. It's a tough blow to Kinneavy, I must admit.

Lorde, on the other hand, makes her path by walking it. It's an affect which, I think, develops like a good story, unwinding before us as we take a walk through it. Paragraphs lack that imperative push of knowing, that exigence of logic where premise lays heavily upon premise. Lorde's words feel more like revelations which unfurl with curiosity and care. Instead of usurping the "advantages of preconstructed cultural assumptions" to create palatable products, much like Woolf she demonstrates how we question those assumptions. We therefore see both her process and her product simultaneously.

A sample from Lorde's "Transformation of Silence into Language and Action": 

     "Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation.
     For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.
     And it is never without fear -- of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective." (43)

I see the moves Lorde makes in her writing - it's as if I'm pondering life's brevity and the importance of silence alongside her. While her ideas are clear, she does not seem to be moving from a center outwards - rather, she meanders within a loosely marked out territory in which several interrelated ideas are brought into play. Kinneavy does no such thing. Kinneavy wants us to believe him; he exhibits a sense of control over where the audience goes with his thoughts. His words have specific instructions and manifestations. Lorde still urges us toward action, but her words are interspersed with musings, revelations, and personal experiences. It champions what DeJoy would call a "feminist model" for process. 

I see what DeJoy means by moving away from mastery, and moving into analysis. 

It seems I reached dry land after all...

In Memoria

What is memoria?

      Memoria is action. It is the funneling of identities and cultural traits from the past to the present so that the past can resonate in the present. That resonance, for minorities who act on a “need to reclaim a memory, memory of an identity as formed through the generation,” transforms the process of identity formation (12). It lays brickwork for people who straddle two worlds so they may seek stable ground beneath their feet. Villanueva mines his cultural past for stories of “the imperial lords, those who have forcibly changed the identities of people of color through colonization” as a way of mapping the collective changes in identity (12). It allows him to distill his present reality into discernible connections and moments of overlap. He develops a connection with Nelly, the department’s graduate secretary, in that their “first imperial overlord was there before the world got large, more local: the Japanese and the Caribes” (12). In this connection, he imagined that “others look and listen on with looks of wondering. It’s not their memory” (12, emphasis added by me). Engaging memoria built conduits for Villanueva; one connected to Nelly, who is otherwise Filipina and not Puerto Rican, and one connected to others. It forged separation and allowed Villanueva to see a connection he shared with anOther. This groundwork would only have been possible through memoria. Villanueva shows us how memoria is movement, construction, synaptic; it refuses stasis and instead becomes engaged with us dynamically to help minority groups construct identity.

      Memoria is movement, connection. It leads us to trace roots, find and create repositories of information in the form of lived experiences. Memoria also discerns tumultuous changes in identity. In the recent wave of historical transmigration and globalization, dozens upon dozens of minority groups are set adrift in cultures not their own. Memoria maps these waves, and guides us here. We come to shore, in the present day.

Negative Ecologies

      LeFevre and Edbauer share a common egalitarian, “ecological”  understanding of rhetoric. LeFevre’s casts invention as a social act which “stresses the dialectical relationship of the individual with society and culture” and also “involves a variety of social relationships with real and imaginary others” in the process of generating unique ideas; culture/Others and the rhetor are inseparable (46-47). LeFevre further articulates that within historical narratives, “individual persons and episodic events do not exclusively shape history; larger, less obvious movements may shape individuals and events” (41). Invention is shaped over time through extended, organic processes. Edbauer’s ecological model of the rhetorical situation almost precisely aligns with LeFevre’s understanding of invention. For her, “an ecological...rhetorical model  is one that reads rhetoric both as a process of distributed emergence and as an ongoing circulation process,” much like how components of a city work together to create itself and the movements which occur within it (13). LeFevre and Edbauer essentially argue that the contributions of each part or exigency is holistically, organically interrelated in the act of invention and in the rhetorical situation.

      What LeFevre and Edbauer incorrectly imply, however, is that the contributions of each exigency to the inventive act/rhetorical situation are equal. Did Edbauer consider the socio-economic demographics of individuals who bought the “Keep Austin Weird” stickers and T-shirts? Is the involvement and input of society/audience equal to the input of the rhetor herself in the creative process? What if the rhetor is a minority - how do her actions and associations with the dominant culture change? I argue that Royster’s position, and that of many other thinkers who discuss issues of minority voice, complicates the essentially equal and egalitarian vision that both LeFevre and Edbauer strongly imply. Not every exigency plays an equal part in rhetoric. In Edbauer’s seemingly symbiotic world of the rhetorical situation, its clear that particular movements, rules, and circulations privilege and exclude certain other movements, rules, and circulations. These exclusions, I argue, mostly likely happen to minority groups. To be part of the symbiotic process requires equal participation, and underprivileged groups often don’t have that “rhetorical currency” to engage in those circulations. In LeFevre’s world, the rhetor works with an imagined audience or seeks feedback and engages in culture. This is presuming a rhetor that has had the skills/education and resources necessary in order to invent in these complex ways. How is invention different if a person of a lower socio-economic status attempts to generate new ideas? What are her struggles, then? Furthermore, Royster clearly demonstrates that boundaries along racial/gendered lines place her in certain subject positions where her voice is usurped, misunderstood, or altogether ignored. How is invention different when an African American woman speaks to other African American women as opposed to a group of white colleagues?  Royster gives the example of a colleague who was appreciating her use of her “authentic voice” when Royster tried to “share the sounds of [her] historical place and to connect those sounds with systems of belief so that deeper understanding might emerge” during a discussion (36-37). After this incident, Royster stopped participating in the conversation; she stopped inventing altogether. Invention and the rhetorical situation become altogether different processes in which the rhetor analyzes and grapples with dominant audiences and exigencies. Royster complicates LeFevre and Edbauer by showing how egalitarian rhetorical processes are the ideal we work toward - not our reality.

Why Discourse?

Discourse, as a term, is defined with great difficulty. Our readings for class today clearly demonstrate that despite there being some “locus” or “kernel” of an idea within “discourse,” the term is open to different interpretations. It can be purely about the modes in which we “abstract” reality into communication, defined by exigencies. Or it is composed of the choices rhetors and audiences make with each other, creating particular discursive spaces that can be (broadly) mapped and categorized (public discourse, private discourse, etc.). 

It is important to study discourse because in every definition, there is some agreement that a discourse is/has structure. Particular rules - whether static or changing - generate/guide/influence the choices made in communicative situations. This makes discourse inherently political - acts of communication within loosely defined spaces influence outcomes and decisions. Rhetoric is the study of communication, loosely, in the way that it influences and shapes actions in the practical world. As such, rhetoric and discourse cannot be separated - we are constantly participated in multiple discourses in a daily basis, and this is inherently also rhetorical. In the classroom, we engage in academic discourse. If we engage in journal writing, we engage private modes of discourse. These are rhetorical moves, and understanding our discursive positions and situations only adds to the body of knowledge defined as rhetoric. 

Plus, it seems important to study because many rhetoricians have written influential articles about it. ;-) 

Berlin As Proof of the “Theory-Praxis” Dynamic

      While all our readings relate to Louise Phelps’ “The Domain of Composition,” I found Berlin’s article useful for understanding her observation about the “theory-praxis” dynamic in Rhetoric and Composition (RC) research because it demonstrates the ideas she puts forth. According to Phelps, scholarship in RC is uniquely geared toward applying and generating theories of composition to practices of composition, which are comprehensive and interdisciplinary. It also views composition as a symbolic action worthy of academic inquiry. I believe that Phelps aptly points out that this “theory-praxis relation” is partially the work of “scholars...attempting not only to explore the conceptual frameworks of the field and its relation to other disciplines, but also to examine the nature of their own inquiry as symbolic action” (182). Furthermore, due to composition’s complex nature, for RC,  “the object of inquiry becomes not writing, reading, or texts, but their relationships to one another, to the individual, and to the world. The significant effect of this move is to greatly expand the domain of composition...it allows us to account for the great richness and diversity of research that claims to fall within the field.” (183). Phelps highlights not only this unique nature of RC, but also its orientation and research purpose - it is the material application of theory (usually in the classroom) to practical problems in written discourse and also “reflexive” research on our modes of inquiry, both of which have “multimodal” and “interdisciplinary” research methods. I see this as the heart of the “theory-praxis” model in RC which Phelps sets out to explore and articulate.

      I see Berlin’s article as a particular demonstration of this “reflexive” nature of RC, as well as a window into the importance of theory within the field. He shows that because are “involved through our teaching mission in the development of literacy, we make ourselves part of the topic of inquiry” (Phelps 190). Berlin demonstrates this very notion as he sets out to “situate the development of English studies within these larger [socio-economic] formations, examining the role it played in the new curriculum” (17). He is reflexive in that his object of inquiry is the formation of the discipline itself in light of bigger social movements and economic developments, which is a direct critique and revision of William Riley Parker’s article; Berlin writes from within the field about the field. What makes Berlin (and Parker too) uniquely part of RC is in the way these histories are then applied toward a greater understanding of literacy practices, and both articles call for direct action in a way that has material implications for teaching composition. This shows how “praxis” is a defining element within RC. The importance of “theory,” then, is highlighted by Berlin’s explanations of competing paradigms in literacy (and his near direct endorsement of the democratic school) which directly affected curriculum and practice in composition pedagogy. And in further connection to Phelps,  Berlin reifies notion Phelps highlights about composition’s complex nature to the outside world - schools of thought regarding literacy and curriculum are not impervious to social and economic shifts, and therefore conversations about college education in composition and literacy have to involve conversations about the relevancy and impact of composition to the world outside the university. Berlin’s article is a clear example corroborating Phelps’ major observations about the nature of RC.