Style in the Diaspora of Composition Studies

Abstract

I make the claim that even though style appears to be invisible in composition studies today, paradoxically, it is ubiquitous, and I examine areas where the study of style has diffused in the field, such as genre theory, rhetorical analysis, and personal writing. I both adopt and complicate Janice Lauer's notion of the “diaspora” as the site of style's migration in composition and argue that it is important to draw explicitly upon the field's rich stylistic resources for practical and pedagogical purposes.

Notes

¹ I am indebted to RR peer reviewers Janice Lauer and Duane Roen for their insightful and encouraging comments on a draft of this article. I thank Lauer for formulating the brilliant concept of a diaspora in composition studies and Roen for careful scholarship that has helped me strengthen my work. Collin Brooke, Dana Harrington, and Jim Zebroski all offered prescient comments on earlier drafts, and I thank them for their attentive and useful remarks. Above all, I am grateful to Louise Wetherbee Phelps, a scholar of tremendous intellect and integrity whose generous support for and belief in my work contributed incalculably to this article's realization.

² I argue that linguistic resources refer to the various systems and subsystems of language-what Saussure calls langue-that are available for writers to deploy in concrete instances-what Saussure calls parole. Style, then, falls under the rubric of parole and involves the use of stylistic features as both habitual patterns and conscious rhetorical choices in specific texts (Butler 3).

³ The recent James Frey affair is another case in point. As Samuel G. Freeman writes in the Columbia Journalism Review, “Far from being an aberration, Frey was merely traveling a well-worn path, especially for tales of personal or familial dysfunction.”

⁴ One of the more surprising areas in which theories of style have moved is into theories of race, class, gender, and cultural difference in composition. Since the social “turn” in composition and in light of CCCC's declaration of Students' Right to Their Own Language, the field has turned forcefully toward these theories within which there has been an emphasis on style in ways often not evident. Further exploration of the implications of style in these areas could be the basis of another fascinating article.

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Notes on contributors

Paul Butler

Paul Butler is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric and composition. His research focuses on the study of style, social theories of argument, legal literacies, and LGBT studies. He has published articles in JAC and WPA: Writing Program Administration, and his essay “Copyright, Plagiarism, and the Law” appears in Authorship in Composition Studies, published by Thomson/Wadsworth in 2006.