The Exemplar Award is presented to a person who has served or serves as an exemplar of our organization, representing the highest ideals of scholarship, teaching, and service to the entire profession. This is a written version of the acceptance speech W. Ross Winterowd gave at the CCCC meeting in Louisville on March 18, 2010. We’re sorry to report that Winterowd died on January 21, 2011.

To understand the history of English, Ross Winterowd insists, one must understand how literary studies, composition-rhetoric studies, influential textbooks interrelate. Stressing the interrelationship among these three forces, Winterowd presents a history of English studies in the university since the Enlightenment.Winterowd s history is unique in three ways. First, it tells the whole story of English studies: it does not separate the history of literary studies from that of composition-rhetoric studies, nor can it if it is going to be an authentic history. Second, it traces the massive influence on English studies exerted by textbooks such as Adventures in Literature, Understanding Poetry, English in Action, and the Harbrace College Handbook. Finally, Winterowd himself is very much a part of the story, a partisan with more than forty years of service to the discipline, not simply a disinterested scholar searching for the truth.After demonstrating that literary studies literary scholars are products of Romantic epistemology values, Winterowd further invites controversy by reinterpreting the Romantic legacy inherited by English departments. His reinterpretation of major literary figures theory, too, invites discussion, possibly argument. And by directly contradicting current histories of composition-rhetoric that allow for no points of contact with literature, Winterowd intensifies the argument by explaining the development of composition-rhetoric from the standpoint of literature literary theory.

This collection of sixteen essays, authored by major scholars in the field of composition and rhetoric, offers an eclectic range of opinions, perspectives, and interpretations regarding the place of composition studies in its academic context. Covering the history of rhetoric and composition from the nineteenth century to the present, the collection focuses on the institutional and intellectual framework of the discipline while honoring Donald C. Stewart, a man who addressed the central paradox of the field: its homelessness as a discipline in an academic community that prides itself on specialization.Over the past two decades composition grounded in rhetorical tradition has emerged as a foundation for liberal and professional studies. These essays, furthering the often disputed point that composition is indeed a discipline, are divided into three parts that examine three crucial questions: What is the history of composition s context? How does composition function within its context? How should we interpret or reinterpret this context?In the first part, the essayists investigate the history of composition teaching, noting the formative influences of the eighteenth-century Scottish rhetoricians in the development of the American tradition as well as the effect of composition on education in general. The essayists question the public perception of rhetoric as the art of flimflam and examine the rise of expressive writing at the expense of argumentation and persuasion.In part 2, the contributors make clear that composition is a discipline in the process of defining itself. They explore the role composition plays in universities and the ways in which it seeks focus and purpose, as well as formal justification for its existence.In the last section, the authors scan the very edge of the field of composition and rhetoric, from examinations of the nature of the composing imagination and of the question of dialogue as communication to feminist theoretical approaches that attempt to bridge the differences between the New Romantics and New Rhetoricians composing models. The essays are enhanced by the coeditors witty and perceptive introduction and by Vincent Gillespie s tribute to Donald Stewart.

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Winifred Bryan Homer, Rhetoric in the Classical Tradition. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. xvii + 462 pages. Ira Shor, ed., Freire for the Classroom: A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, Heinemann, 1987. Afterword by Paulo Freire. 237 pages. Erika Lindemann, Longman Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric: 1984–1985. Longman, 1987. xviii + 318 pages. Longman Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric: 1986. Longman, 1988. xv + 249 pages. Richard M. Coe, Toward a Grammar of Passages. CCCC Studies in Writing and Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988. 123 pages.

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The social sciences and humanities bring different attitudes and methods to the problem of meaning. From the “scientismic” point of view, meaning is quantifiable and is largely what Tulving called “verbal” knowledge. The scientismic view, however, is flawed in three ways: its failure to account adequately for “episodic” knowledge, to view language as an event, and to understand modes. The literarist view of meaning is equally flawed. However, the scientismists have most of the political power; hence, the literarists are losing the battle for their set of values and their versions of literacy. A realignment of literary studies under the aegis of rhetoric is necessary.

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(1983). Black holes, indeterminacy, and Paulo Freire. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 28-36.

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I change my What can I believe and what must I doubt? In this new philosophy of reasons Wayne C. Booth exposes five dogmas of modernism that have too often inhibited efforts to answer these questions. Modern dogmas teach that you cannot reason about and that job of thought is to doubt whatever can be doubted, and they leave those who accept them crippled in their efforts to think and talk together about whatever concerns them most. They have willed upon us a befouled rhetorical climate in which people are driven to two self-destructive extremes defenders of reason becoming confined to ever narrower notions of logical or experimental proof and defenders of values becoming more and more irresponsible in trying to defend the heart, the gut, or the gonads. Booth traces the consequences of modernist assumptions through a wide range of inquiry and action: in politics, art, music, literature, and in personal efforts to find identity or a self. In casting doubt on doubt, the author finds that the dogmas are being questioned in almost every modern discipline. Suggesting that they be replaced with a rhetoric of systematic assent, Booth discovers a vast, neglected reservoir of good reasons many of them known to classical students of rhetoric, some still to be explored. These good reasons are here restored to intellectual respectability, suggesting the possibility of widespread new inquiry, in all fields, into the question, When should I change my mind?

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