Archival Research in Composition Studies: Re-Imagining the Historian's Role

Abstract

This article argues that historians of composition studies are burdened by adherence to history-as-narrative in archival research, whether supporting or countering master narratives of the field. I propose that historians redefine their work in conversation with the principles of archival ethnography, a concept from the field of library and information science. Reseeing historiography through this lens means privileging the position of the archivist as community interloper, thus creating a shift in responsibility from interpretation of archival material to public transmission thereof. Re-imagining the historian's role as ethnographic also aims to redress the ethical burden of inevitable re-presentation of past agents, practices, and values.

Notes

1I am grateful to the RR peer reviewers of this article, Dr. Hugh Burns and Dr. Brad Lucas, for their valuable feedback and guidance.

2In her essay “Preserving Our Histories of Institutional Change,” Shirley Rose argues that composition and rhetoric archivists develop closer relationships with library science professionals in order that they might better understand the very construction of the archives, and the choices made in assembling individual archival repositories; she also argues that WPAs need to be archivists themselves and should transmit materials to subsequent and fellow WPAs. Her argument, however, does not use the term archival ethnography, nor does it advocate for a relabeling or reification of the ways in which archival work gets done in the field of composition and rhetoric, as I am articulating in this essay.

3A fascinating (if inadvertent) enactment of this is in James J. Murphy's opening vignette in “Rhetorical Historiography and the Octalogs,” when he notes that two attendees at the 1988 Octalog whispered to one another, describing the Octalog participants about to speak, ‘I don't care anything about this subject—I just want to know what THEY look like.’ I realized suddenly that I was not a person, but a footnote. I was a stance, a position, a reference point” (239). Murphy's existence as an historical “footnote” is an example of another way historiography can go wrong: in the simple recovery of figures as figures, persons in a narrative that itself does not give actual voice to its original narrators.

4A striking example of archival work that enacts this very question is Henze, Selzer, and Sharer's 1977: A Cultural Moment in Composition, which examines the first-year composition program at Penn State University during the 1970s in the context of concurrent developments and conflicts in the field. Using program archives as well as interviews with former faculty and staff, Henze et al. challenge the limits of archival representation by attempting to assemble a local past that speaks to that history as well as with its present. In their introduction the authors remark that “linear Grand Narratives [of composition studies]… . are somewhat less serviceable for preserving the astonishing range of practices, personalities, and messy particulars that strove for a hearing, however temporarily, within the mixed aggregate that has been known as composition,” noting, as I have here, the conflicts of history that sometimes are elided in narratives of the field (44). 1977 in part also answers my desire for multiply-represented archival voices through its notable “Sidebars” feature that provides brief insights from leading composition and rhetoric scholars regarding the “moment” that was 1977, both inside and outside Penn State, and their activities and perspectives whilst in that moment. But the book also, and importantly, represents the difficult enterprise of researching and writing about one's graduate (or home) institution and accurately representing the views of those voices still living, yet also represented in the archives. Thus it privileges in its methodologies—perhaps more than any other recent historiography—Lerner's concerns for the people behind archival work.