Book Review -- March 9, 1999

Phelps, Louise Wetherbee. Composition as a Human Science: Contributions to the Self-Understanding of a Discipline. New York,: Oxford University Press, 1988.

See also review by Neel, Jasper. "Composition as a Human Science." College Composition and  Communication 41 (Feb 1990): 94-96.

I. Table of Contents

Part One: Constructing an Ecology of Composition

1 The Cultural Ground

2 The Idea of Compositions as a Discipline

Part Two: The Process of Reconstruction

3 Possibilities for a Post-Critical Rhetoric

4 Imagining a Psychology of Composition

5 Literacy and the Limits f the Natural Attitude

6 The Dance of Discourse

7 Dialectics of Coherence

8 The Third Way: Paul Ricoeur and the Problem of Method

Part Three: Application

9 Toward a Human Science Disciplined by Practical Wisdom

II. Summary and Comments 

 Quotes and Connections

• Phelps hopes to establish Composition as a discipline separate from literature and comparable to the natural sciences - composition as a human science. She believes connecting composition with literature "misrepresents and distorts its proper relation to the disciplines" (45).

• "Each special domain of knowledge (art or science) involves the work of a community of investigators engaged in a dialogue by which they delineate and explore a "world" understood as a particular horizon or field of human concerns. What distinguishes the human sciences is the fact that within their thematic worlds the investigators have a communicative relationship not only with one another but with the object of study as well. ‘The natural sciences constitute a thematic horizon in which the data under investigation (natural objects and events) do not endow their behavior with meaning . . [In the human sciences ] the investigatable data are human agents who endow their own gestures, speech, and actions with signification. What is at issue. . . is human actions, motives, purposes, and concerns, which directly inform the self-understanding of the agents and actors under consideration’" (25).

• "All sciences share a hermeneutical nature, first, through their grounding in a prescientific understanding, and second, in constituting their meanings and truths through dialogue and interpretation. However, only the human sciences. . produce interpretations of interpretations" (25).

• Phelps tries to develop a scientific (theoretical) frame for composition in a postmodern world. Themes of "loss, illusion, instability, marginality, decentering and finitude" have led to the instability of our intellectual universe. These fluctuations and uncertainties lead Phelps to advocate the development of a "new positive framework for human life" that emerges from themes in the sciences, philosophy and the humanities

Comments

• "Every serious scholar in the field of composition must read Louise Phelps . . . The book sets out to do for composition what Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures did for linguistics, Derrida’s Of Grammatology did for philosophy, and Milett’s Sexual Politics did for feminism. Not surprisingly, Phelps falls considerably shore of her goal, but at this time in the development of the field, the importance of her serious, rigorous attempt will be obvious to anyone who invests the effort the book requires. . . . Phelps has written a book that most composition professionals will have to work very hard to read (Neel 94-96).

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