“Recently, composition and rhetoric scholars have argued for an ontological turn in the field…” (96). OMFG… Seriously? another “turn”? Let’s see… We have a “genre turn” (Barwashi & Reiff 2010), an “affective turn” (Nelson 2016), “the digital turn” (Dyehouse, Shamoon, Pennell 2009), “the multimodal turn”… of course… (Palmeri, etc. 2012), the famous “social turn” of Faigley’s 80s, the “archival turn” (Hayden 2017)… It’s difficult at this point to take any talk of “turns” seriously for me. Our “turns” are not helpful, I’d argue (with Yancey), particularly in forming a disciplinary identity. Ah, yes, of course, there’s “The Posthuman Turn in Composition” (Lucia 2018). Actually, I could take just about any term, plug it into Google scholar with a “Rhetoric and Composition” “…. turn” and “voila!” This on-the-brink ness is akin to Booth’s charge of “novomania”… We still got it.
Here is their point: “In recovering the ontological thinking of such foundational composition theorists as Ann Berthoff, Richard Young, Alton Becker, and Kenneth Pike, we demonstrate that compositionists have long recognized the agency of everyday things in the act of composing” (96)
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