Leading a burgeoning self-critical moment in composition studies and writing program administration, Postcomposition is a fundamental reconsideration of the field that attempts to shift the focus away from pedagogy and writing subjects and toward writing itself. In this forceful and reasoned critique of many of the primary tenets and widely accepted institutional structures of composition studies, Sidney I. Dobrin delivers a series of shocks to the system meant to disrupt the pedagogical imperative and move beyond the existing limits of the discipline. 

Dobrin evaluates the current state of composition studies, underscoring the difference between composition and writing and arguing that the field's focus on the administration of writing students and its historically imposed prohibition on theory greatly limit what can be understood about writing. Instead he envisions a more significant approach to writing, one that questions the field's conservative allegiance to subject and administration and reconsiders writing as spatial and ecological. Using concepts from ecocomposition, spatial theory, network theory, complexity theory, and systems theory, Postcomposition lays the groundwork for a networked theory of writing, and advocates the abandonment of administration as a useful part of the field. He also challenges the usefulness of rhetoric in writing studies, showing how writing exceeds rhetoric. 

Postcomposition is a detailed consideration of how posthumanism affects the field's understanding of subjectivity. It also tears at the seams of the "contingent labor problem." As he articulates his own frustrations with the conservatism of composition studies and builds on previous critiques of the discipline, Dobrin stages a courageous-and inevitably polemical-intellectual challenge to the entrenched ideas and assumptions that have defined composition studies.

 

Sidney I. Dobrin is an associate professor of English at the University of Florida and the author, coauthor, or coeditor of numerous books, including Ecosee: Image, Nature, and Visual Rhetoric and Don’t Call it That: The Composition Practicum.

An established and prolific scholar, Dobrin (English, Univ. of Florida) has authored and edited several books that have moved the field's discourse beyond student writing processes and program administration. Here the author underpins reference to scholars and theorists whose ideas and claims build his notions on how the field might further evolve. He devotes the first several chapters (of seven) to establishing long-standing problems of self-definition and limitation in composition studies and to defining concepts central to his proposals—concepts such as "posthuman" and even the concept of "space" as it pertains to the discipline. Those who accept the argument in chapter 4 on the stagnation of current scholarship and the diminished value of the work of writing-program administrators may be interested in the remaining chapters and their proposition of a "posthuman" paradigm shift toward systems theory, complexity theory, and fluid mechanics to "disrupt" composition studies toward more productive and appropriate scholarly venues. The somewhat playful final chapter seems meant to cajole; even so, the sting of Dobrin's unflinching critique is palpable. Occasionally more repetitive or verbose than necessary, this dense book is a must read for specialists. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. -- C. E. O'Neill, New Mexico State University at Alamogordo

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An established and prolific scholar, Dobrin (English, Univ. of Florida) has authored and edited several books that have moved the field's discourse beyond student writing processes and program administration. Here the author underpins reference to scholars and theorists whose ideas and claims build his notions on how the field might further evolve. He devotes the first several chapters (of seven) to establishing long-standing problems of self-definition and limitation in composition studies and to defining concepts central to his proposals—concepts such as "posthuman" and even the concept of "space" as it pertains to the discipline. Those who accept the argument in chapter 4 on the stagnation of current scholarship and the diminished value of the work of writing-program administrators may be interested in the remaining chapters and their proposition of a "posthuman" paradigm shift toward systems theory, complexity theory, and fluid mechanics to "disrupt" composition studies toward more productive and appropriate scholarly venues. The somewhat playful final chapter seems meant to cajole; even so, the sting of Dobrin's unflinching critique is palpable. Occasionally more repetitive or verbose than necessary, this dense book is a must read for specialists. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. -- C. E. O'Neill, New Mexico State University at Alamogordo

"In all, the impact of Postcomposition promises to be a meteor-and-the-dinosaurs scenario. The dust will settle, and we'll have/be something different."—Jeanne Gunner, co-editor of The Writing Program Interrupted
 

"The author's purpose is to disrupt, and for those readers who understand that Composition is best served by scholarship that challenges our own complacencies and institutional placement, this will be a most welcome (and much needed) book."—Frank Farmer, author of Saying and Silence: Listening to Composition Studies with Bakhtin