Frank:
So the scholarly ethos. Interesting to think of this phrase in relation to Peter's course: Contemporary Issues. And we come up with a bunch of issues that at least the three of us don't give a hoot about. We settle, I guess, on the "the field as moved on..." into some sort of scholarly void.
"I guess my point is that it's probably not enough to rehabilitate our ethos. In fact, our ethos might be doing just fine. It's our logos that's all off. Pathetic.
Peter:
Yesterday I sat in on a roundtable about the demise of the humanities, hosted by SBU's Cultural Studies program. General consensus was that the strength/value of the humanities is our teaching, and that we need to make a better case for that institutionally and publicly, etc., as we've all heard many times before. But that's not a particularly scholarly thing to do. So a teaching-focused field like ours continues to lack the kind of ethos we equate with legitimate scholarly disciplines (a tired issue of 100+ years by now), which is why composition studies is pushing for majors, minors, and disciplinarity these days. But the writing major seems to yield mainly "writing about...," "writing for...," or technical courses that either emphasize skills (e.g., grammar) or look a lot like courses in other disciplines (e.g., writing about film) if not for their writing-intensive focus, both of which are pedagogical distinctions. So our distinguishing characteristic, again, comes down to teaching. Scholarship about teaching doesn't seem to impress anyone but ourselves (and we're not too impressed, either, if post-process is already an afterthought). Would it be true to say that the most abiding subject in our scholarship since the fall of poststructuralism has been crisis-proclaiming "university studies"? That is, books and articles about how supposedly empty our work is and/or how poor our working conditions are? It's been more than a dozen years since Bill Readings started leading that parade (longer if you trace its origins back to Berube, or Ohman, etc.), and where has it realistically taken us as a field, in the academy, in the public's eye? If you were pressed to say what our biggest impression on the public ever was, what would you say? Is it freewriting? I mean Writing Without Teachers was a best-seller. What else have you got?
