interviews and the history of

rhetoric and composition

In other words, if the interviews were not to happen, what sort of things would be lost; or conversely, what do you see the field gaining from this kind of work?

e d i t o r s'  n o t e

b a c k g r o u n d s

e a r l y  i n t e r e s t s

s u p p o r t

j o u r n a l s

n u t s  &  b o l t s

r e c e n t
  &  f o r t h c o m i n g

l o c a t i n g  s u b j e c t s

c o u r t s h i p

q u e s t i o n i n g
  &  c o l l a b o r a t i n g

t r a n s c r i p t s
  &  e d i t i n g

e t h i c s  &  v o i c e

g e n r e  &  m e t h o d

r h e t o r i c
  &  c o m p o s i t i o n

c o m m u n i t y

As far as the importance to the field as a whole, I think it does have a value. I guess someone could make the argument that an interview like this is not serious scholarship, or it doesn’t have a chance to go into much depth. You know, if you’re interviewing Victor Villanueva, you just hit the highlights and a few brief references to things, but we don’t have a chance to get into depth, the kind of depth that you have in a scholarly article or something like that. But I think it does have a value as preserving institutional or disciplinary memory, documenting the development of a field over time: particularly in composition studies, since it’s a relatively young field. 

A lot of the people that we, and other journals, interview have been instrumental in the development of that discipline. And you get their perspective outside of their published work, just summarizing other arguments that they’ve made in print, but they talk about what went on behind the scenes. How did that article come about? Why did they start writing about such and such a topic? It seems like a lot of people we talk to started off in literature. We’re interested in talking to people about how did they move from literature to technical communication—or wherever it is they ended up. What are the connections there?

In the interview we did with Rebecca Moore Howard, she talks about how she delayed publishing a lot of stuff on plagiarism until after she got tenure, because of how controversial it might be. And so she wrote about more safe topics in order to get tenure. I don’t know how much detail she went in on the subject, but it’s the kind of detail that might not otherwise be recorded, at least in print. And you see how maybe their thoughts develop over time. One of the things we tend to do is point to quotes from scholarly works, and ask people about how they see that applying since they published it, to elaborate on it. Sometimes you see that the statement they made sounds very deep and profound and sophisticated, but it might be something that they might have modified, qualified, or changed since the time they published it. 

So you get to trace scholars’ developing thought processes, and basically see them as human beings to a certain degree. I think it’s very valuable in understanding different scholars and the work they do, why they do it, the struggles they themselves have had behind the scenes, and how their thinking develops, how that fits in with the changes in the discipline as a whole.

Eric Schroeder: I cannot talk about interviews in general, but at Writing on the Edge, we’re trying to conduct interviews that appeal to people already in the field. What would Andrea Lunsford say about our interview with David Bartholomae? We are conscious that occasionally people like Andrea will read Writing on the Edge—she’s been on our board for a while. 

Just as important to me is what somebody who is starting her first quarter teaching at a new place and not really familiar with the field of composition thinks. Maybe she has a degree in English literature and all of a sudden finds herself teaching composition, trying to get some more grounding in some of these people. How is this particular interview introducing the work of this person to this new teacher? I have a sense of the interviews as a mechanism for introducing people new to the field to the work of some of the more important scholars working in it.

You’re talking about a potential meta-commentary then. For example, “What would Andrea Lunsford think about this interview with Peter Elbow?”

Yes and no. The second situation I described is more in the front of my mind I think—making these people accessible to those who are newer in the field and haven’t read them yet. At the back of my mind is always that other question, “How can I make this interview interesting to somebody who has worked in the field for a long time?” “What are they going to think of it?” Yes, “meta-commentary” is probably a good way to put it. 

The more I do interviews with people like that and get to know them, the more I develop a sense of them. I think, “What would Peter Elbow think of this?” He’s got a funny, quirky sense of humor. “Would he find this amusing or would he think this is silly?”

Is conducting interviews scholarly work?

God, I hope so because it’s the only sort of academic work I seem to do a lot of these days.

Some critics might say, “You’re simply making up questions and turning on a tape recorder. It’s just question-and-answer. You transcribe the responses, but it isn’t the same task as spending time in the library doing background research and composing original material as you would with a scholarly article.” 

Well, I understand that argument. I suppose in some ways it’s valid. On the other hand, for anybody to dismiss an interviewer who is really rigorous is foolish and ignorant. One of the reasons I like to collaborate with John Boe is that he prepares so well. He did not want to do Wayne Booth at first because he knew what kind of a reading task he had ahead of him. In the fall, he read something like twenty books by Wayne Booth. He and Wayne Booth got into this little game where he was trying to ask Booth about the most esoteric things he had ever written. After a while, Wayne Booth even said something like, “God, you’ve read everything I’ve ever written. You’re asking me questions about stuff I forgot about twenty years ago.”

I think that for people who take it seriously, not just the genre but as a practice, there is a need for the interviewers themselves to prepare rigorously in terms of the background demanded to do in an interview. Here the person is also constrained by the form. You think, “I’ve only going to get an hour and this thing’s going to turn out to be fifteen to twenty pages typed and here’s everything I could do in that time. In some ways, it is a more editorial process than an analytical one, although that’s probably a false distinction. Writing certain kinds of critical articles is certainly not easy either. It demands careful attention and preparation.

Interviews represent a part of our disciplinary history that cannot be addressed any other way. There are members of the field who are still with us but slowly disappearing. It seems that interviewing affords a means to preserve those contributions too. 

At CCCC, you were carrying Storylines: Craftartists' Narratives of Identity by Elliot Mishler which suggests you've been really looking at how others have either used interviews or theorized about them.

Well, to be honest, that influence really comes from my wife's goading. For many years, my wife taught writing in the health sciences at UC Davis until she retired a couple of years ago. She is very interested in narratives about health. She found out about Mishler's work and just raved about it and kept trying to get me to read it.  

The parts of it that appealed to me, of course, were the parts about his methodology, but I'm not a great fan of theory at all. I was never really pushed in that direction in graduate school.  When I was coming through graduate school, theory was really taking off and I missed the boat in a way. I've taught myself some of that, but it's not the kind of reading I would ever do for fun.

I'm very workman like in what I do. I'm going along, doing what I've been doing for a lot of years, trying to refine it along the way. My practices really did get set years ago now. It would be hard for me to say how many I've probably done. I did the book of interviews and I've done at least another ten with Writing On the Edge, but virtually every interview we've ever published in WOE has gone through my hands. 

The quantity is there now. I just hope that over time that people think the quality was there.