ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the felt sense among radical faculty and graduate students that U.S. college composition has been corrupted in recent years by neoliberalism and has thereby betrayed its progressive legacy. In contrast, this chapter argues that such a view mistakes the history of the field as a whole for the episodic appearance of left formations within composition. This chapter traces how composition’s history of weaknesses, compromises, and concessions have left it defenseless against the marketization of consciousness in the neoliberal era. Then it examines the emergence of the New Left in composition and how its involvement in the 1974 Students Right to Their Own Language and the 1988 National Language Policy illustrates the struggle for revolutionary consciousness. This chapter closes with lessons that might be drawn about the political turn in the Trump years and beyond.
