| In this study, I assemble and examine versions of composition history at one higher education institution, Ohio University (OU), focusing on the years 1825-1950. Primarily, I study texts housed in the OU archives, and I consider an eclectic array of source types, from students' letters to local history books to course catalogs and notes from meetings of OU administrators. But rather than attempt to give a full, complete history of composition at this site, I rely on a sophistic rhetorical tradition to surface and problematize rules that composition scholars abide by when we construct histories, and I center my study on sophistic principles that approximate the modern-day concepts of community, context, composition (variously defined), and communication (understood as oral and performance based). Emerging from this sophistic tradition, my results are tentative and potentially conflicting. I find that there is no single overarching narrative of composition history at OU. Instead, what my study shows are ways in which composition at OU has reflected the norms of the University and the Athens, Ohio, community conformed to the commonplace attitudes and opinions of the local populace assumed various forms for groups with varying degrees of power and developed alongside and through an oral rhetoric used for public performances. I use this study to theorize an approach to composition historiography that takes into account the locatedness of writing and a sophistic understanding of textual meaning. Such a historiography would continuously critique the historian's sources and interpretive tools and would join in a wider postmodern resistance to metanarratives. |
