ACCORDING TO THE CONVENTIONAL NARRATIVE, Composition Studies evolved as a discipline through a series of paradigm shifts over the past forty or fifty years. Under the mode of "current-traditional rhetoric" which prevailed into the 1960s, writing instruction was chiefly a matter of correcting grammar and mastering rhetorical conventions. Beginning in the late 1960s, with the rejection of institutional authority characterizing much social movement of that decade, the focus of writing instruction shifted toward the student writer as a person: through attention to the writing process over the written product, the discovery and cultivation of the writer's self or voice through written expression would help liberate her from the authority of rules and conventions (grammatical, rhetorical, and by implication social). Such a mission grew increasingly important as open admissions policies of the 1970s increased the ranks of non-traditional and less-well-prepared students in university classrooms. By the early 1980s, however, composition scholars grew critical of this once progressive expressivist or process-oriented paradigm. Notions of the writer finding her individual voice as a means of asserting the self's autonomy seemed naive in the face of social realities. Student writers came to be seen as much if not more constructed by various authorizing voices than by their own voices. Thus, postprocess pedagogics sought to help students to recognize the social, cultural, and institutional situatedness of their writing. There are close and distant parallels to be drawn, I think, between this disciplinary narrative and those that could be constructed for other areas of language, literature, and literacy studies: English, Creative Writing, Literary Theory, Linguistics, Communications, and so on. For example, current traditional approaches to composition clearly have a parallel in New Critical approaches to literature By contrast, so-called Language Poetry as it emerged in the academy in the 1980s presented a critique of individual voice and expression and the workshop model of confessional narrative poetry at the heart of much Creative Writing pedagogy. Language Poetry also paralleled the rise of theory in English departments: while historically coterminous with the ascendancy of expressivist pedagogy in the 1970s and 1980s, theory likewise challenged the very notions of a cohesive self independent of social forces that seemed so central to voicist rhetoric and metaphors in composition.
