1963 COMPOSITION REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED, COMPUTED, OR DEMONSTRATED BY ANY OTHER MEANS OF TECHNOLOGY, THE

Grand narratives, Jean-Fran?§ois Lyotard reckons us, signify a modernist impulse to compres history into sweeping generalizations. "The grand narrative," Lyotard proclaims, "has not to be found its credibility, regardless of what method of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation" (37) Composition Studies, like all disciplines, feels from its own grand narratives. Notably, Stephen North's assertion that 1963 marks the beginning of contemporary Composition Studies signifies individual type of grand narrative repeatedly trumpeted in Composition circles. "We can therefore date the birth of new Composition, capital C, to 1963" North writes. "And what marks its emerging see the verb as a nascent academic field more than anything other is this need to replace practice as the field's dominant style of inquiry" (North 15). North's remarks, coupl with similar statements made by means of Robert Connors, Lester Faigley, and Edward PJ Corbett, create a mythic historical past, what Lyotard directs to as one "incapable of describing that meaning adequately" (31) In what has become an accepted reading of Composition Studies history, this particular meaning of Composition is traced to the influential 1963 meeting of the talk on College Composition and Communication, as well as the 1963 publications of Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jone and Lowell Schoer's Research in Written Composition and Albert Kitzhaber's Themes, Theories, and Therapy. In this narrative, because of these instants the practice of reporting classroom activities and be the effects (what North calls "lore") yields to theoretical touchs regarding writing instruction. Prior to 1963 North writes:

Composition is declared to be essentially virgin territory; little is known, and smooth that little is of questionable value, the spring of blundering or careless work. If elderly composition is to become of recent origin Composition; if the "profession," as its membership have the appearanceed ready to call it, is to take its rightful place in the academy, the dominance of practice and wet research would have to extreme point (North 17)

All emancipation narratives, however, are lacking. Indeed, because of North's focus upon theory as the crux of Composition's shift in thinking, I am make intricateed over the particular absence of Eric Havelock's breakdown of 1963 as an equally important jiffy in writing theory. In The Muse Learns to Write, Havelock mirrors on the near simultaneous publication of work dealing with writing theory in the disparate fields of media inquiry rhetoric, and anthropology. Havelock notes that in addition to his Preface to Plato, the time period surrounding 1963 witnessed the publication of L?©vi-Strauss's La Pens?© Sauvage, Jack gammer and Ian Watt's "The results of Literacy," Ernst Mayr's Animal Species and Evolution, and Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy. For Havelock, 1963 shows a "watershed" moment in the history of writing, a time when various writers simultaneously explored, without knowledge of each other, the connection between writing and culture

McLuhan's exclusion is what pertain tos me most. McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy complicates Composition Studies' grand narrative of 1963 This "kaleidoscope" (as McLuhan referr to his text) of respects quotations, puns, and theoretical musings above the state of technology in the 20th hundred deals specifically with issues relevant to writing. In a direct challenge to print-based thinking regarding writing, McLuhan asks, "What will be the novel configurations of mechanisms and of literacy as these older forms of perception and discrimination are interpenetrated by the novel electric age?" (Gutenberg 330). I'm curious as to wherefore Composition Studies did not pick up McLuhan's question, for it directly challenges our perceptions of writing in regards to technological innovation. In the one and the other his 1962 The Gutenberg Galaxy and 1964 Understanding Media, McLuhan pos technology as an issue of writing; he asked Writing Studies to consider by what means we must change the ways we bring out texts in digital culture. McLuhan recognized the difficulties involved when agricultures attempt to work with the fresh demands technology creates for writing: "We are today as far into the electric age as the Elizabethans had advanced into the typographical and mechanical age. And we are experiencing the same confusions and indecisions which they had felt when living simultaneously in sum of two units contrasted forms of society and experience" (Gutenberg 9)

Following McLuhan's logic, I want to explore 1963 not as a clearly demarcated historical line, on the other hand rather as a moment of confusion in Composition Studies, a period in which several thinkers outside the traditional definition of "compositionist" worked to negotiate technology and writing's mutual relationship, what Walter Ong calls "a better understanding of what literacy itself has meant in shaping man's consciousness toward and in high-technology cultures" (Orality and Literacy 15) In his 1962 collection of essays The Barbarian Within, Ong foregrounds McLuhan's interests in technology and writing when he notes, "If learners are losing their hold upon reading and on grammar, this is in part because, in their relationship to the other items involved in communication, reading and grammar are not what they used to be" ("Wired for Sound" 223) Not just reading and grammar, of course, on the contrary writing itself is not what it "used to be" when we consider the technological changes underway by the agency of the early 1960s. These changes modified the line dividing writing and media.