ABSTRACT
The title of this volume fits this introductory chapter because it states so well the scholarly climate and attitude of the 1960s and 1970s as rhetoric and composition was forming itself into a disciplinary field within the academy. In an earlier essay, “Dappled Discipline,” I argued that composition studies (read rhetoric and composition) had already acquired the features of a discipline including special phenomena to study, modes of inquiry, a history of development, theoretical ancestors and assumptions, an evolving body of knowledge, and epistemic courts to grant status to new knowledge. It also had a department home, a ritual of academic preparation, and scholarly organizations and journals. That essay also related the field of rhetoric and composition to the teaching of writing but did not consider them synonymous. Today the nature of the field and its disciplinarity continue to be discussed and debated,
In this chapter I focus on the expansive 1960s and 1970s when people began to publish scholarship on writing and to speak of establishing an academic rhetorical field within English studies. Gradually during this period, courses, seminars, and finally graduate programs in rhetoric and composition emerged, thereby helping to construct a disciplinary domain. These startling developments required a lot of space for library expansion, intellectual territory, offices and classrooms, conferences, and tolerant, even exuberant, openness among those beginning to work in this area.
