Making the Midcentury, Modern

ABSTRACT

Bernard Malamud’s novel A New Life and its attention to midcentury writing instruction illuminates the emergence of rhetoric and composition. Malamud’s novel is what microhistorians describe as “exceptional typical” evidence, where exceptional status and typical topics combine to showcase power formations in historical context. The novel describes shifts in textbooks and writing curricula, identifies the emergence of process-oriented assessment practices, and witnesses the institutional and disciplinary marginalization of female instructors. As such, Malamud could be described as a proto-composition scholar. Reflecting upon his legacy at their institution, the authors consider the re-naming of a student lounge named after Malamud.

Notes

1. The authors of this article would like to thank RR reviewers David Fleming and Duane Roen for their advice and suggestions.

2. Such politically motivated firings were not uncommon for the time or the Pacific Northwest. In 1948, the Canwell Hearings at Washington State University led to the dismissal of six faculty members. A year after Spitzer and LaValee’s firing, Reed College president Duncan Ballantine removed the philosopher Stanley Moore.

3. Kitzhaber, chair of CCCC in 1959, began teaching at the nearby University of Oregon in 1962, a year after Malamud left OSU.

4. Other site-specific histories of composition have shown us how to perform this research, and include studies from Thomas Masters (2004), Henze et al. (2007), David Fleming (2011), Kelly Ritter (2012), Nathan Shepley (2016), and James Beasley (2018). For a listing of other local histories, see Heyda (1999).

5. ^;Berlin relates how the freshman writing program at Syracuse handled these “forms” in the early 1920s, with English A focused on literature, English B on expository writing, and English C on “sentence analysis and sentence structure,” including correct spelling and grammar (66).

6. Levin refers to another course as “Grammar Z.” This course was likely “basic writing,” and the alphabetic designation was meant to parody the lowly position of the course in university curricula. Levin refers to the course as full of “wholesome, snappy drill,” where students were not expected to write more than sentences and paragraphs (41).

7. The pages concerning “definition” are heavily annotated in pencil in both readers, possibly suggesting that Malamud taught from this material.

8. Robert Estrich elaborated upon the plight of English departments struggling to teach a growing student population: “let us be quite candid. A steady diet of 9 to 12 hours of teaching in one essentially remedial area, grading 60 to 100 themes a week, does not in time just pall on a lively and sensitive mind” (Estrich 86 qtd. in Heyda 675).

9. “Themes” were so prevalent at OSU that Lisa Ede reflected how she used the term in course descriptions until 1988 (91).

10. The idealized student in this context was unlikely to be a person of color, as Oregon’s long history of racial exclusion laws mean that the state was (and still is) not very diverse. In 1926, Carrie Halsell became the first black student to graduate from Oregon State.

11. Among returning veterans, few were Black, as the practice of racial exclusion remained pervasive in non-HBCUs. “Due to rigid segregation at predominantly White schools in the south and a continuation of policies that supported de facto segregation at northern schools,” Brian Haynes explains, “the majority of the Black troops returning from WWII matriculated at Historically Black Colleges and Universities” (13).

12. Documents from Malamud’s hire note that he was hired to supplant an instructor named Margaret Ireland, whom the then head of the English department noted, “resigned to get married” (Peterson).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder

Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder is an Associate Professor at Oregon State University where he teaches courses in rhetoric, technical and science writing, and writing pedagogy. His research has appeared in journals such as College English, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Kairos, and he is the author of Communicating Mobility and Technology: A Material Rhetoric for Transportation (Routledge).

Ruth E. Sylvester

Ruth E. Sylvester is a PhD student in rhetoric and writing studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. She researches the multimodal contexts of composition in writing across the curriculum and writing centers.

Marisa Yerace

Marisa Yerace is a PhD student in rhetoric and composition at Purdue University. She researches feminist methodologies and creative placemaking.

Matthew Fuller

Matthew Fuller is a MA student in rhetoric, writing, and culture at Oregon State University. He researches connections between afro-pessimism, rhetoric, and writing.