from where we're standing, you look ghetto

The final page of Scholes' The Rise and Fall Of English turned with an unintentional slap of reality:

“But when professors became philologists, scholars, or literary critics, they deeply resented helping students with a prose that was neither literature nor anything else, but just “composition” –just as students resented and resisted learning a kind of writing that seemed to have no function beyond school” (p. 190).

Like Bonhoeffer, who got so innured to dungeon life that that he forgot about his imprisonment in Flossenburg "for weeks at a time", I blithely forgot about my own confinement:

“This {production} is the part of English that is usually put beyond the pale--as “creative” writing-- or down in the dungeon--as "composition" (p. 159).

Therefore, sentences like this one had to be read and reread for meaning:
“The useful, the practical, and even the intelligeable were relegated to composition” (p. 35).

Waaaaait a second, I thought. We're the ones who do the "relegating" around here! Why just the other day Sharon's student brought in his big dumb deconstruction book, and she calmly said,

"nooow, if you want to use that in your literature courses, that's perfectly fine.

Yeah. She relegated his head straight".

What even well-intentioned and perspicuous literary scholars liek Scholes fail to realize is that, like most indigenous peoples, composition scholars are not pressing our noses against the stained glass waiting to be "discovered":

“What I finally realized was that English departments need composition as the “other” of literature in order to function as they have functioned” (p. 35).

The above sentence is at once heartwarming and insulting. We built this department 1 syllogism at a time so you could have a place to deconstruct stuff (or whatever): You've finally noticed us?

On a second reading, I came to immensely appreciate Scholes' move toward a rapproachement. Still, though, scholars within the fields of composition, rhetoric and technical communication should remain critical of "integrationist" claims such as this one:

“Under this sign, there is no difference between the theory of composition and the theory of literature” (p. 36).

As Malcolm X points out, anyone who has been systematically enslaved should be critical of steps toward "integration", especially of integration initiated by the people who were doing the enslaving:

"Who ever heard of angry revolutionists all harmonizing "We shall overcome ... Suum Day.. ." while tripping and swaying along arm-in-arm with the very people they were supposed to be angrily revolting against ?The only way we'll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every op pressed people in the world: the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, ... Cuba - yes Cuba too" ("El-Hajj Malik-Shabazz", p. 456).

For composition scholars, the danger of overarching alliances with literary scholars "is not a case of wanting either separation or integration.The use of these words actually clouds the real picture" (Malcolm X, "missing page numbers"). Rather, any initiative from within literary studies to disolve the disciplinary boundary between comp. and literature presents the risk of subsuming composition into a power structure that swears that, with our dedicated help, it can stop being exploitative.