The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field / Edition 1

by Steven M North

Overview

In a style that combines scholarly care with remarkable readability, North examines the development of the field of composition in a way it has not been examined before. Rather than focusing on what people claim to know about teaching writing, he concerns himself primarily with how they claim to know it. Eight groups of knowledge-makers are treated in separate chapters: Practitioners, Historians, Philosophers, Critics, Experimentalists, Clinicians, Formalists, and Ethnographers. Each of these chapters orients the reader by tracing the mode's first uses in the field and listing its best known and most important adherents; then goes on to explain how the mode of inquiry works, illustrating key points with painstaking analysis of well-known studies. In his final three chapters, North turns from these individual modes to consider the field as a whole: How have these different ways of making knowledge come together? What is Composition now, and what is it likely to become?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780867091519
Publisher:	Heinemann
Publication date:	03/17/1987
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	403
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

Table of Contents

A Historical Context

composition Becomes Composition

Practice as Inquiry

The Practitioners

The Scholars

The Historians

The Philosophers

The Critics

The Researchers

The Experimentalists

The Clinicians

The Formalists

The Ethnographers

The Dynamics of Inquiry

The "Revolution" in Composition

Revolution, Phase II.: To the Victors . . .