ABSTRACT
Since the mid-1980s, the politics of our field changed abruptly from consideration of actual students and their behaviors and attitudes in the classroom to consideration of the theoretical and historical discourses that might make up the content of composition as an academic discipline in the liberal arts; from students and discussion of actual differences and identities to discourse and discussion of difference and identity as theoretical concepts; from the students in our classrooms and the here and now problems of race, class, and sex to the resurrection of exceptional minority figures in the history of rhetoric.
