On My Disciplinary Birth [2011]

A commonplace circulates that Rhetoric is the mother of Composition. Situated high enough up the ladder of abstraction or far enough back in time, the premise is true, I suppose, sort of like Lucy, that fully upright Australopithecus afarensis, being the mother of all the people now inhabiting the planet Earth. But at the level of our very real, immediate, biological lives, we each have a mother who is not Lucy. And to extend the metaphor, insofar as it can hold, my disciplinary mother is not Rhetoric but English Education. In 1981, my old intellectual self embraced the English Education program at New York University. Two years later, well before graduation, I was a living, breathing, sometimes hollering, compositionist.