ABSTRACT
Read in juxtaposition, Janice Lauer’s and Darin Payne’s essays on graduate education (chapters 7 and 8) struck me as symbolic expressions of a twofold experience of time in rhetoric and composition, in the contrasts and connections they make between “past” and “future,” “history” and “change.” Together they suggest how time infuses the fi eld as an internally bifurcated dimension of its graduate programs. I’d like to take them up here as generative metaphors for exploring temporality as a formative feature of doctoral education, which has the paradoxical goal of ensuring both the continuity of the fi eld and its continual reinvention. These essays demonstrate how that task mutates and expands as we travel the moving arrow of time.1
