The 1979 Ottawa Conference and Its Inscriptions: Recovering a Canadian Moment in American Rhetoric and Composition (original) (raw)

2015, Microhistories of Composition

In May 1979, Aviva Freedman and Ian Pringle hosted an international conference on "Learning to Write" at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, featuring a concentrated assemblage of eminent scholars as speakers and respondents. Those present sensed immediately that they were part of a momentous and historic event. Janet Emig, who delivered her famous "Tacit Tradition" speech at the conference, remembered it later as "the single most electric professional meeting I ever participated in" (Emig 1983, n.p.). Many delegates saw it as the rightful successor to the landmark Dartmouth Conference of 1966, and when Anthony Adams, the closing speaker, suggested it might even eclipse Dartmouth as the most important conference ever held on English education, "there was a general murmur of assent" (Oster 1979, 24). Freedman and Pringle (1980) acknowledged and honored this heri tage, but as editors of Reinventing the Rhetorical T r adition, one volume of papers from the conference, they consequentially shifted its context, recasting the meaning and significance of the event in terms of the dis ciplinary study of writing rather than the teaching of English. Freedman spoke of the 1979 conference later as corroborating "the reality of a new, or should I say renewed, discipline: writing research or rhetoric or composition theory" (Maguire 1995, 83). 1 The primary theme of Reinventing is a coming-of-age story in which the conference is both the occasion and the means for writing studies to emerge on the scene as a full-fledged, intellectually compelling, and already international disci pline. This is not the whole story, though, because the two other pub lications from the conference focused on layers of its meanings that more fully engage the broad concerns of internationalized English and