Toward renewal of audience: College writing, academic culture, and public intellectual discourse.

Two arguments for devoting resources to American higher education--the extension of democratic culture through liberal education, and the advancement of knowledge--are increasingly hard to reconcile. Chapter I introduces writing as a central concern: the kinds done by students and by faculty, the kinds required by public intellectual culture and by professional academic inquiry. Writing, understood in large contexts, becomes a vantage point from which to scrutinize the Academy's cultural obligations. Chapter II, The Success and Failure of Writing-Across-the-Curriculum (WAC), critiques relevant literature in rhetoric and composition and offers an empirical survey of textbooks. It contests claims made by influential advocates that WAC initiates students into academic disciplines; it finds instead that WAC tends to promote public intellectual as opposed to professional academic discourse. Far from a shortcoming, however, this orientation to educated nonexpert audiences is a strength--and an implicit pedagogical and cultural critique of academic professionalism. In Chapter III, History as 'Public Utility,' the discipline of history serves as a test case for the critique elaborated in preceding chapters. (History, it is argued, has a larger potential nonacademic audience than English, or literary studies.) Through accounts of history's fortunes in WAC and professional historians' discussions of style, audience, and rhetoric, and testimony solicited from thirteen academic historians who have reached large audiences, the uneasy failure of professional culture to cultivate public readership is analyzed. The final chapter, Discourse and Democracy: Toward Public Intellectual Pedagogy, examines the consequences of a fuller integration of public intellectual culture into higher education, specifically in writing classes. Presentism, bias, and political topicality are discussed with reference to arguments of rhetoric and composition specialists; a recent controversy at the University of Texas is analyzed; and limited evidence of political slant in WAC textbooks is presented. The study concludes with an optimistic view of the effects of public intellectual culture and renewed audience on the professionalized academy. This optimism is based partly on a return to the public intellectual and liberal democratic tradition of debate, as evidenced most recently in the issue of political correctness on campus.Ph.D.American studiesEducationEducation historyLanguageLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/128774/2/9135681.pd