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A panel at last year’s MLA discussed the question of “content” in composition, with most presenters voicing the argument that cultural studies-based approaches to writing risk a return to a version of “writing about literature” classes, with “reading the culture” replacing short stories, novels and such. A related position was sketched out by Richard Fulkerson in a June CCC article (with the additional concern that students in cultural studies-based courses may feel they are being indoctrinated by Liberal Professors). These and other anxieties stem, in my view, from a view of texts as static rather than dynamic: communication studies has been calling attention for decades to what audiences do with texts. Work with audience can remind us that, far from being passive recipients of media and other sorts of texts, we are frequently involved in using these and other bits of the culture for our own purposes, for text production in all sorts of genres.
What we can and should do in writing classes involves factors beyond the disciplinary field of composition. To mention three: 1) Composition scholars and teachers are largely not in control of their work. Since the early ‘90s, accrediting agencies have become more insistent about assessment—we are now more responsible for devising goals and outcomes, with the implicit threat of losing institutional support; 2) also since the early ‘90s, computers, the internet, digital photography, and other technological developments have expanded and diversified “writing” to make available to non-professional writers, including our students, ways of “writing” which are partially or entirely visual, which include video and sound, which are interactive, which are relatively inexpensive, and which are potentially world-wide in distribution. The dominance of the essay as a subject of instruction—essays being thought of as entirely verbal, non-material genres—is open to question. 3) Contemporary culture is awash with texts, many visual or composite, and many openly rhetorical in the sense of being addressed to audiences in order to achieve specific purposes. Restricting our field too narrowly risks making our work irrelevant.