Work
DYLAN B. DRYER
Work is an exceptionally old word, as is its first documented association with the labor of writing (“On þære bec, þic worhte” circa 900 CE [Compact Oxford English Dictionary 1991, 2338]). Few other words have become such powerful organizing constructs for everyday life (Thompson 1967), or are as susceptible to changes produced and reflected by social and technological transformation (Takayoshi and Sullivan 2007), or are as vulnerable to specifically motivated interpretations (Gee, Hull, and Lankshear 1996). As Bruce Horner has already shown, its uses in composition studies are complex: its gerund (typically modifying conditions) is usually distinct from its noun, which tends to signify “published scholarship,” and both those meanings are distinct from its predicate, which usually refers to teaching (Horner 2000, 1–29). Horner’s discussion of the persistent idealization of these three meanings illustrates that arguments about work in composition are always partial views of what the field should be (or should resist becoming). Work is thus employed as much to retrench as to include.
While no amount of backing up will get the entire landscape of this problematically capacious word within the frame of this essay, it is still useful to recall that composition is also a “federation of knowledge structures” (Martin 2008, 807) initially forged in 1970s hotel conference rooms that “crackled . . . with the intensity of revival meetings” (North 1987, Preface). As composition emerged from (its memories of) those rooms, those bonds weakened under strains introduced, paradoxically, by composition’s efforts to have its work recognized as legitimate by the departments in which it was housed (Bloom 2003; Mahala and Swilky 1997; 2003; Phelps 1995; Winterowd 1998). Hairston thus urged composition to end its exploitation by those who valued us only for our willingness to do the “work they don’t want” and to resolve instead “to put our primary energy into the teaching of writing and into research that informs the teaching of writing” (Hairston 1985, 276, 281).
It should be clear from Hairston’s insistence on the primacy of teaching that there was already disagreement over what work in composition should be. But an attempt to reconsolidate the meaning of “our work” as “teaching writing” founders on disagreements concealed by the word itself: how writing should be taught, what sorts of writing should be taught, and how (or even whether) it should be assessed. Such disagreements are philosophical, but are also grounded in material conditions of practicability. In fact, since four-fifths of composition courses appear to be taught by “guest workers” (Columb 2010, 14) and administered by the so-called “boss compositionist” (Bousquet, Scott, and Parascondola 2004; Sledd 2001), the more relevant possessive pronoun is often your work (see Gere 2009). Alienation in these conditions is inevitable: some teachers will always find some elements of any mandatory curriculum objectionable (Welch 1993); some metrics for rehire are actively contradictory (Henry, Kahn, and Lynch-Biniek 2012, 2); and dominant assumptions about “your” gender (Grego and Thompson 1996, 65–68; Holbrook 1991; Miller 1991; Tuell 1993), “your” race (Behm and Miller 2012) or “your” job security (Crowley 1998; Fitts and Lalicker 2004; Sch...
