The History of Literacy and
Literacy Studies in American Colleges
English 696d-001, Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 Physics & Atmo. Sci. 316
Thomas Miller, Admin. Bldg. 501, 626-0202, tpm@u.arizona.edu
Personal Homepage: http://tmiller.faculty.arizona.edu/
Course: http://tmiller.faculty.arizona.edu/history_literacy_and_literacy_studies_american_colleges
COURSE DESCRIPTION
We will explore how college English studies have evolved along with
broader changes in literacy and the literate since the colonial origins
of American higher education. We will look past the development
of the field to examine the development of literacy and the literate.
To ground rhetorical studies in rhetorical practices, we will review
theories of social movements, articulation, genre, and publics. Our
discussion will provide a range of opportunities for us to explore
how the teaching of English has been shaped by the expansion of
educational access and the evolution of professionalism as a
cosmopolitan ideology that helped unify broader classes of readers.
Our explorations of the impact of such movements will provide a
context for us to reflect upon the transformations in literacy that
are currently redefining what we study and how we teach it.
COURSE TEXTS
Miller, Thomas P. The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns, 2011.
Packet of excerpts from selected primary texts and articles (with those copyrighted using the password rhetor).
COURSE OUTCOMES
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You will develop research methodologies through a sequenced series of assignments to help you learn how to
refine a research question, develop appropriate methodologies, and critique others’ methods.
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You will also refine your theoretical perspective with a well-defined interpretive vocabulary informed by
related scholarship that forms a coherent interpretive framework that you can apply to selected objects of study
and use to bridge theory and practice.
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The course assignments will also help you historicize your
research program by providing opportunities to work closely
with related historical texts and contexts, mapping broader
socio-ideological trends, and developing a well-informed
historiography.
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The cumulative sequence of assignments will also help you
improve your writing skills by providing you with staged
opportunities to engage related scholarship, outline a
program of research, and draft and revise a paper with
detailed attention to improving your style, engaging personal
experiences, and deepening your arguments.
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COURSE ASSIGNMENTS
You will write four assignments: a review of a book that addresses the historical
development of your research interests, a literature review of at least eight books and
articles to map out your research agenda, a proposal that builds on your literature review,
and a seminar paper. We will incorporate your research into the course readings and
discussions. The following suggestions are intended to outline the assignments, not to limit
your sense of possibilities.
 Book Review (3-5 pages, with drafts due on 2/7 and revisions on 2/14, for 10% of final grade)
 Literature Review (6 pages, 8 sources, drafts on 3/1, and revisions on 3/8, for 15% of grade)
 Proposal (3-4 pages, with drafts on 4/4 and revisions on 4/11, for 15% of final grade)
 Journal Article (15 to 20 pages, with group 1 drafts on 4/25 and group 2 on 5/2 and revisions on 5/12, for 35% of
final grade, including the presentation of the full draft in the workshops).
 The rest of the course grade will be based on daily class participation (10%) and responses to drafts (15%).
Book Reviews are a good way to begin publishing. Working on the genre will help you to work on summarizing the
arguments of books, locate them in disciplinary discussions, and reflect upon their claims to significance. Your book
review should include a coversheet and a published review of another book that you have examined to learn how to
summarize arguments, analyze their significance, and relate them to issues of importance in the field.
The coversheet should include 1) a paragraph on why you selected the review as a model, 2) a paragraph on how the
book is related to your research interests, and 3) a paragraph reflecting on how you have framed your review to appeal
to specific concerns of the audience for the journal that you have selected.
As with all the assignments, the draft is due to D2L by 5:00 on the due dates, and you should respond to two other no
later than two days later by midnight. As with all papers, respond to drafts that do not already have two responses.
Hard copies of revisions should be submitted to my mailbox with your draft and your responses by 5:00 on the due date.
The Literature Review should develop a unifying analysis and not simply summarize sources. A literature review
should generally focus on a specific problem, controversy, or area of study. Throughout the course, we will work on
reading as writers by focusing our discussions on the arguments of readings and considering the relations among them.
Your introduction to the review should set out the context for the issues and trends that you
will survey in your literature review. The review should be organized around an overall
evolution or development to frame your summaries of the individual sources.
The conclusion of a literature review is crucial because it generally sets up the need for further
research, and it will be particularly useful in helping you think ahead to the next assignment.
The Proposal is a reduced and focused version of the literature review. In so far as it requires
you to project a line of analysis and set out guiding claims, this assignment has similarities to
both conference proposals and dissertation proposals.
To revise your literature review, you should expand your framing to establish your theoretical
context, and perhaps the historical context as well. Your introduction should set out your definition
of the problem or issue in terms that establish why your approach is important and how it will solve
the problem or elucidate the issue in ways that your readers will see as significant.
The body of the proposal should be tightened by cutting the supporting specifics. Your focus in this
assignment is not on reviewing the sources but on setting up how your overall analysis fills a gap or
moves beyond the published research.
Your conclusion may expand upon your claim to significance by connecting with broader trends, or your may review
your argument to reiterate its significance. As with the rest of the proposal, your purpose is to demonstrate the
significance of your line of research.
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The Journal Article will follow through on your literature review and proposal. You will
include a cover sheet that has the same four paragraphs as your literature review. Your
article should begin with a lead that connects with your readers’ interests. Your
introduction should relate your research to a problem or issue that your audience will
see as significant. As with the review, your framing should develop your historical and
theoretical context, and you may also want to set out the parameters for your study.
In your body paragraphs, you will build on the skills you used in the literature review by
leading with well defined points, quoting selectively, and summarizing and synthesizing
your sources to advance your overall argument.
One of the major challenges posed by writing longer pieces, as you know, is to set out a
unifying overall argument. Sectional headings can be useful to divide your argument
into shorter sections. The sections should generally have introductions and conclusions
that relate the sections to the overall argument.
WEEKLY ASSIGNMENTS
1/21
Reading Publics and Politics
We will open our discussions by considering New Literacy Studies as our opening frame, and then we will follow through
to consider the eighteenth-century expansion of the reading public and the creation of the essay as a blurred genre.
Please read these pieces, and if you have time to read ahead, you will find Foucault’s essay for next class very helpful in
understanding these developments.
 “Literacy Practices” by David Barton and Mary Hamilton from Situated Literacies.
 “The Expansion of the Reading Public, the Standardization of Educated Taste and Usage, and the Essay as
Blurred Genre," The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces.
 Spectator essays (Course Packet)
If you are interested in learning more about New Literacy Studies, you may also want to read “What’s ‘new’ in New
Literacy Studies: Critical approaches to theory and practice” by Brian Street, a leading contributor to paradigm.
1/28 Literate Modes of Self-Representation and Self-Determination
To provide an initial set of case studies, we will consider the literacy acquisition narratives
and statements on self-determination by several representative figures.
 Introduction to The Evolution of College English (1-23)
 “Rethinking Literacy: Comparing Colonial and Contemporary America” by Deborah
Keller-Cohen
 Michel Foucault's "The Subject and Power"
 Literacy narratives of Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, and Elizabeth Cady
Stanton (Packet)
Also, if you would like to develop a fuller sense of Douglass’ historical experience, including how he taught himself to
write in the margins of his master’s schoolbooks, you should scan the Columbian Orator, the first book that Douglass
bought for himself. While we may tend to read this work as a textbook, those with limited access to education used
such texts for self-instruction. If you have the time, consider what lessons Douglass would have drawn from selections
such as a Dialogue Between a Master and Slave and an Oration on the Powers of Eloquence.
2/4 The Rhetoric of Enlightenment
In this class, we will focus on the texts that shaped the transition from classical to modern rhetoric as education
expanded to readers who were not versed in ancient languages. The secondary reading focuses on Blair’s and
Campbell’s American contemporaries. Blair and Campbell influenced figures such as Witherspoon (a former classmate
of Blair’s) as well as the textbooks and self-instruction manuals that popularized English studies in the next century.
 George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776). (Packet)
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George Jardine’s Outlines of a Philosophical Education (1818). (Packet)
Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783). (Packet)
“Republican Rhetoric,” Evolution of College English (56-86).
Patricia Harkin’s “Historicizing Rhetorical Education” book review
 2/7 Draft of Book Review due to D2L, with responses due 2/10 and revision due on 2/14.
The complete online versions will provide you with a broader sense of George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776)
and Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1787).
2/11 What’s Public in Education
In this and the next class, we will examine how the expansion of cheap print literacy converged with the institution of
state-mandated schooling to expand and consolidate the proprieties of literate usage and taste. Common schools,
sometimes termed dame schools, provided rising numbers of women with the means to earn an independent living as
teachers and writers. Be prepared to speak briefly about the focus and framing of your evolving research project.
 Michael Warner’s “Publics and Counterpublics”
 Horace Mann, “On Education and the National Welfare” (1848)
(Packet)
 Samuel Newman. A Practical System of Rhetoric (1832). (Packet)
 Almira Hart Phelps. “Rhetoric, Criticism, Composition.” Lectures to
Young Ladies (1833). (Packet)
 “When Colleges Were Literary Institutions,” Evolution of College
English 87-123.
 Book Review due in my departmental mail box on 2/14.
If you are interested in reading further into the transformation of the modern public sphere by print literacy, you may
also wish to read Simon Susen’s “Critical Notes on Habermas’s Theory of the Public Sphere” (which examines the impact
of the diversification of the contemporary public sphere by newer technologies. A copy Jürgen Habermas’s Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere is also available on line.
2/18 Developing Your Critical Lexicon
The distinction between organic and traditional intellectuals is but one of the critical formulations that Antonio Gramsci
developed to explore how dominant cultures script the modes of expression that are set out for marginalized groups.
Intellectuals who identify with such groups face assimilationist pressures to speak with propriety, while at the same time
they also face questions about how they can claim to represent groups with which they identify, but whose experience
they may not share. For examples, we will examine how and what antebellum women learned and taught.
 Antonio Gramsci, “(i) History of the Subaltern Classes; (ii) The Concept of ‘Ideology’; (iii) Cultural Themes:
Ideological Material.” Selections from the Prison Notebooks.
 Mary Kelley’s “Women’s Antebellum Reading Circles”
 Bacon and McClish’s “Nineteenth-Century Literary Societies of Philadelphia and Rhetorical Education”
 J. Hamilton Moore. The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Monitor and English Teacher's Assistant (1824) (Packet)
 Sarah J. Hale. Ladies’ Magazine 2.1 (1829) (Packet)
2/25 Constituting Publics
Following on the chapter on the expansion of the reading public from the first class, we will explore the limitations of
liberal models of natural rights and democratic deliberation by considering how Cherokee leaders unsuccessfully sought
to claim their rights to self-determination by establishing schools, identifying themselves with literate self-improvement,
and forming a representative system of self-governance, only to be dispossessed and sent West on the “Trail of Tears.”
 Phillip Round’s “The Cherokee, A ‘Reading and Intellectual People’” from Removable Type: Histories of the Book in
Indian Country, 1663-1880.
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Elias Boudinot’s “An Address to the Whites” (1826) (Packet)
“About the Cherokee Phoenix,” Cherokee Phoenix (1828) (Packet)
“Extract from . . . an address. . . by a young Cherokee” (Packet)
Preambles to the US Constitution (1787) and Constitution of the
Cherokee Nation (1828) (Packet)
Mary Hershberger’s “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The
Struggle against Indian Removal in the 1830s”
For research on Cherokee rhetoric, consult the work of Ellen Cushman, who
has published The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing The People’s Perseverance.
To read about rights rhetorics, you may wish to consult E Pluribus Unum:
America in the 1770s, 1850s, and 1920s, especially A Rhetoric of Rights.
 Draft of Literature Review Due 3/1, with responses due 3/3 and revision on 3/8.
 Be prepared to nutshell the argument of your literature review in class.
3/4 Abolitionist and Suffragist Movements
With the expansion of literacy and schooling, rising numbers of women and minorities began to claim the right to
represent themselves in politics and in print. Abolitionist and suffragist movements are good sites for assessing how
rhetoricians frame issues to challenge prevailing assumptions and mobilize social movements. We will use the two
articles on framing theory to launch the discussion. We will not be able to get to them all, but I wanted to give you a set
of the diverse genres, voices, and frames. We will pay particular attention to Allen, Truth and Douglass, especially
Douglass’s “Self-Made Men,” which we will contrast with Stanton’s “Solitude of Self” to consider the modes of
subjectivity that were set out for readers and listeners. We will need to be more selective with the other pieces. Please
select two that you would like to lead the discussion of, and post to everyone when you’ve made your selections so that
we can get discussion leaders for as many as possible.
 Ellen DuBois’s "The Radicalism of the Woman Suffrage Movement”
 Owen Whooley's "Locating Masterframes in History"
 Richard Allen’s “An Address” (Packet)
 Sojourner Truth’s "Ain't I a Woman?" (1851); “Address to the . . . American Equal Rights
Association” (1867). (Packet)
 Frederick Douglass’s “The Meaning of the Fourth of July to the Negro” (Packet)
 Frederick Douglass’s “Self-Made Men” (1852) (Packet)
 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott’s Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions (1848).
(Packet)
 Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Address to the National Woman Suffrage Convention” (1869)
(Packet)
 Susan B. Anthony’s “Is It a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?” (1872). (Packet)
 Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Solitude of Self” (1892) (Packet)
 Margaret Fuller Ossoli’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Packet)
 Revised Literature Review Due 3/8, both to my mailbox and on line.
Social movement theories provide a rich set of interpretive categories that are useful in studying how groups frame
issues to foster not only collective action but also various forms of identity politics, which have been studied in terms of
“new social movements.” Most relevant is Craig Calhoun’s “’New Social Movements’ of the Early Nineteenth Century.”
3/11
Locating History: Two Case Studies of Local Histories
Beth Leahy and Juan Gallegos will attend this class to discuss their research on how print literacy affected the complex
interactions of education, class, language, and ethnicity in nineteenth-century New Mexico. Juan will discuss his
dissertation proposal and Beth will discuss the essay she has revised for her comprehensive exams. I will be out of town
and will miss this class. Please be prepared to discuss your research interests with Juan and Beth.
 Beth Leahy’s “Sí, Se Habla Español Aquí: University of New Mexico Students Respond to the 1902 Statehood Debate”
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Juan Gallegos’s dissertation proposal, On the Banks of the Gallinas: Bridging Academic and Public Literacies
Raul Ramos’s “Chicano/a Challenges to Nineteenth-Century History”
Brian Fehler’s “Reading, Writing, and Redemption: Literacy Sponsorship and the Mexican American Settlement
Movement in Texas”
Regional studies can be enriched by drawing on ethnic and gender studies, as evident in Miroslava Chavez-GarcÍa’s
“The Interdisciplinary Project of Chicana History: Looking Back, Moving Forward”
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3/25 Archiving Teaching Writing
In this class, we will continue the discussion of historical research methods. We
will continue the discussion of local histories, but we will expand our frame of
reference to consider how archives of professional practices such as journals
and national reports can be used to frame studies of institutional and social
practices. As a case in point, we will consider the constraints imposed on the
teaching of composition by the oppressive working conditions that have been
the norm for over a century.
Kelly Ritter’s “Archival Research in Composition Studies: Reimagining the Historian’s Role”
English Journal, review the first issues, especially these articles:
“Can Good Composition Teaching Be Done under Present Conditions?” (1912) by Edwin M. Hopkins.
“Training for Teaching Composition in Colleges” (1916) by J. M. Thomas
“A National Survey of Conditions in Freshman English” (1929)
Adams Sherman Hill’s “An Answer to the Cry for More English” (Packet)
Robert Connors’ “Overwork/Underpay: Labor and Status of Composition Teachers Since 1880”
For oppositional methodologies, you may wish to consider Luz Calvo’s review of Methodology of the Oppressed and
Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, or if you have more time, Chela
Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed, particularly the conclusion.
4/1 Teaching in Publics
We will continue our discussion of research methods with an eye to helping you reflect on your own research and
writing as you work on your seminar papers. To aid with that process, we will consider an argument for including an
explicit methods section in historical studies, and then we will consider three models for the studies you are working on
along with the source materials for one of the studies
 Barbara L’Eplattenier’s “An Argument for Archival Research Methods”
 Suzanne Bordelon’s “’What Should Teachers Do to Improve Themselves Professionally?’: Women’s Rhetorical
Education at California State Normal School Alumni Association in the 1890s” and also
o The Pacific Coast Teacher (look at the articles Bordelon cites to assess her use of primary texts)
 Kathryn Fitzgerald’s “The Platteville Papers: Inscribing Frontier Ideology and Culture In a Nineteenth-Century
Writing Assignment”
 David Gold’s “’Where Brains Had a Chance’: William Mayo and Rhetorical Instruction at East Texas Normal
College, 1889-1917”
 Draft of Proposal Due 4/4, with responses due on 4/7 and revisions due 4/11.
4/8 The Progressive Movement’s Contributions to Service Learning, Community Literacy,
Ethnography, Action Research, and Critical Pedagogy
Before turning to your presentations in the last classes, we will draw together our discussions of social movements, civic
perspectives on rhetoric, reflexive and situated historiographies, to consider whether they might provide a progressive
disciplinary paradigm. In this and the next period, we will reflect on this overall question by examining aspects of the
progressive era.
 Victoria Maria McDonald, “The Paradox of Bureaucratization: New Views on Progressive Era Teachers and the
Development of a Women’s Profession”
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Elisabeth S. Clemens, “Organizational Repertoires and Institutional Change: Women's Groups and the
Transformation of U.S. Politics, 1890-1920”
Julie Garbus's “Service Learning, 1902”
Susan E. Noffke, “Professional, Personal, and Political Dimensions of Action Research”
"How the Teaching of Literacy Gave Rise to the Profession of Literature" (Evolution 124-61)
 Revised Proposals Due on 4/11, both to my mailbox and on line.
4/15 A Pragmatic Stance on the Critical Potentials of Creativity
We will examine Dewey’s aesthetics to explore how the political potentials of creative and reflective writing and reading
become more apparent when we think of art not as an object but as an experience. To follow through on the
implications of this perspective, we will examine the significance of two figures within English studies who developed
creative and situated models of the pragmatics of creative writing, reading, and teaching.
 John Dewey’s Art as Experience
 Gertrude Buck’s “What Does Rhetoric Mean?” Educational Review 22 (1901): 197-200.
 Buck’s “Recent Tendencies in the Teaching of English Composition,” Educational Review 22 (1901): 371-82.
 Louise Rosenblatt’s “Theory and Practice”
If you are interested in reading further, take a look at Dewey’s Experience and Education, Duane Roen and Nicholas
Karolides retrospective on Rosenblatt, and this summary of the second chapter of her Literature as Exploration. If we
had more time, we would follow up to explore the “new pragmatists” such as Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty, perhaps
using Kenneth Burke to make the connection, as David Blakesley details in “Kenneth Burke’s Pragmatism—Old and
New.” A related line of development can be traced back to Rosenblatt’s impact on early reader-response theory.
4/22 Expanding Our Field of Vision to Deepen Our Field of Work
From our studies in the seminar, we will reflect upon why composition, English education, and outreach all ended up
peripheral to our profession’s sense of itself. Our discipline’s failure to invest its intellectual capital in its institutional
work helps to explain how the emergence of rhet/comp as a field of research has had so little impact on the exploitation
of comp teachers, and why a managerial mindset too often characterizes composition studies.
 “At the Ends of the Profession” (Evolution 173-217)
 “Conclusion: Why the Pragmatics of Literacy are Critical” (Evolution 218-50).
 Steven Brint, In an Age of Experts
 Wendy Griswold’s “The Ideas of the Reading Class”
 Alexander W. Astin and Letician Oseguera, “Declining ‘Equity’ of American Higher Education”
 Draft of Seminar Papers on 4/25.
4/29
5/6
Group 1 Presentations/Workshops
Group 2 Presentations/Workshops