College Composition and Communication Jun 2005

Summary & Critique: Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Richard Fulkerson

Abstract

I argue that examining two collections of essays designed for the preparation of new writing teachers and published twenty years apart provides some important clues to what has occurred to composition studies in the interval. Building on the framework I established in two previous CCC articles, I argue that composition studies has become a less unified and more contentious discipline early in the twenty-first century than it had appeared to be around 1990. The present article specifically addresses the rise of what I call critical/cultural studies, the quiet expansion of expressive approaches to teaching writing, and the split of rhetorical approaches into three: argumentation, genre analysis, and preparation for “the” academic discourse community.

Journal
College Composition and Communication
Published
2005-06-01
DOI
10.58680/ccc20054826
CompPile
Open Access
Closed
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Citation context

Cited by in this index (15)

  1. Campbell et al. (2026)
    Embodied Response to LLM Writing
    Pedagogy
  2. Hutton et al. (2024)
    A Commonplace Problem: Uncovering Composition’s Tacit Axiologies of Reading
    College Composition and Communication
  3. (2024)
    Symposium: The Homosexual Imagination: A Fifty-Year Retrospective
    College English
  4. Xin (2024)
    What Can the History of the English Language Research Offer? A Diachronic Corpu…
    Across the Disciplines
  5. Mazzolini (2023)
    The Institute, the Archive, and the Smoke-Filled Room
    College Composition and Communication
Show all 15 →
  1. Klausman (2023)
    Is There a “Good” Writing Program in This Two-Year College? Thirty-Plus Years o…
    Teaching English in the Two-Year College
  2. Overstreet (2022)
    Writing as extended mind: Recentering cognition, rethinking tool use
    Computers and Composition
  3. Bowen et al. (2020)
    Identities Developed, Identities Denied: Examining the Disciplinary Activities …
    College Composition and Communication
  4. Klausman (2018)
    Feature: The Two-Year College Writing Program and Academic Freedom: Labor, Scho…
    Teaching English in the Two-Year College
  5. DeVaull-Robichaud (2017)
    In Their Own Words: How Peer Tutors Can Foster Critical Thinking, Dialogue, and…
    Double Helix
  6. Szymanski (2015)
    Understanding the Journals that Write Us: A 30th Birthday Reflection
    Computers and Composition
  7. Colby (2014)
    Writing and Assessing Procedural Rhetoric in Student-produced Video Games
    Computers and Composition
  8. Ringer (2013)
    The Dogma of Inquiry: Composition and the Primacy of Faith
    Rhetoric Review
  9. Anson (2009)
    The Promise of Eye-Tracking Methodology for Research on Writing and Reading
    Open Words: Access and English Studies
  10. Heard (2008)
    What Should We Do with Postprocess Theory?
    Pedagogy

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