comp quotes

“English departments need composition as the “other” of literature in order to function as they have functioned.  The useful, the practical, and even the intelligible were relegated to composition so that literature could stand as the complex embodiment of cultural ideals, based upon texts in which those ideals were so deeply embedded as to require the deep analyses of a trained scholar.  Teachers of literature became the priests and theologians of English, while teachers of composition were the nuns, barred from the priesthood, doing the shitwork of the field.”

From The Rise and Fall of English by Robert Scholes

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“Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence.  The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.”

From Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

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“The personal essay is an art form that may help to resolve the conflict within many of us–students and faculty alike–who mourn the strange fact that, by choosing lives in the English department, we have given up language in order to have it, that we have to cease creating literature in order to interpret and discuss it.  That the business and the pleasure of English are antithetical to each other.”

From “Business, Pleasure, and the Personal Essay” by Harriet Malinowitz