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Robert J. Connors. Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture. 347 pages. $45.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
History is about storytelling. And like any good narrative invested in recounting tales of forebearers, its aim is not only to create an image of the past but a way of understanding what we see. We are drawn to history because its story is our story-by gazing backwards we learn the past as well as something of the present and possibly even something of our future. It allows us to place ourselves as participants in an historical tradition, parts of which we wish to claim and others which we would prefer to distance ourselves from. In Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy, Robert Connors describes historians as the storytellers of the field charged with drawing the threads of the discipline into a coherent whole. "I am trying here to build a fire," he writes, "around which we can sit and discover that we do know the same stories, and dance the same dance" ( 18). For it is through our shared understanding, he claims, that composition studies will achieve unity as a discipline. Connors has been providing us with tales of our past for almost two decades now, uncovering stories of composition's 19th-century heritage that explain unfamiliar practices as well as that which has been carried down the years into current theory and teaching. His early tales (as well as those of other historians), however, have been marked by a derisive and impatient tone that aims, as Stephen North explains in The Making of Knowledge in Composition, to identify the "wrongheadedness" of antiquated practice that "now in the bright light of progress, is perfectly obvious to us" (85). Such an "un-selfconscious, even patronizing chrono-centrism," North claims, is a potentially risky approach to historical inquiry (85). While the composition studies community may not explicitly guide an historian's project, the historian can be influenced by prevailing narratives or pressures in the community. And in the case of tales that represent our 19th-century predecessors as "fools" and their work as "mediocre," members of the community can certainly be moved to leave the fireside in search of another story-one that aims to understand rather...