III. Background

A. Context: Collaboration Contested

As Cooper notes, the field of composition developed out of a history of approaches to invention very much centered on a view of a writer as a single, isolated unit. Crowley traces a history of current-traditional rhetorics through over a century of writing textbooks in which the authors assume that invention “takes place entirely in the mind where thoughts are conceived and connected. Language literally re-presents thought, which in turn represents the author’s perception of reality” (343). However, as new, traditionally “underprepared” writers from different backgrounds and social classes began to enter universities in the 1960s and 1970s, their presence challenged writing professionals to reexamine the stereotype of the self-sufficient author (Shaughnessy, Rose).

According to Crowley’s history, current-traditional rhetorics were expanded upon by expressivist approaches such as those of Elbow and Macrorie, which encouraged the development of writers’ individual voices, and cognitivist approaches such as those of Flower and Hayes, which investigated writers’ mental problem-solving strategies in the act of rhetorical discovery.¹ Despite these expansions, though, these approaches all held in common a model of invention that placed the focus for generating ideas on an individual composer as a self-contained unit. Whether through that composer’s interior fusion of thoughts represented via language, their uniquely expressed personal voice, or their cognitive problem-solving strategies, the composer served as the main locus for the creation of new knowledge.

Yet composition scholars, committed not only to researching and teaching writing but also to its craft and practice, were not satisfied with these early models of invention. As Crowley notes in her research on invention in early composition textbooks, “I was continually struck by the disparity between the formulaic composing process recommended by current-traditional composition textbooks and the messy procedure that writing is for most people” (344). In this case, she challenges the limitations of current-traditional approaches to invention based on her own experiences as a writer and as an observer of others’ lived writing processes. A similar spark of interest and spirit of inquiry serves as the driving motivation for the grounding of this study in both autoethnographic and narrative documentation of other composers’ lived composing processes.

Other works around the time of Crowley’s 1986 study indicate a general shift towards a deeper understanding of the relationship between composers and other people. For example, in his 1985 apology for peer tutoring, Bruffee rejects models of learning as an interior, mental process of taking in information. Instead, he argues, “Learning is an activity in which people work collaboratively to create knowledge among themselves by socially justifying belief” (95). Knowledge in this case is not presented as an entity to be transferred into a passive subject, but rather it is the result of active creation, generated by multiple people in conversation with one another. Similarly, in “Audiences Addressed/Audiences Invoked,” Lunsford and Ede call for “an enriched conception of audience” that balances “the creativity of the writer with the different, but equally important, creativity of the reader” (169-170). These articulations of the relationship between writer and audience, or between multiple learners, are significant in that they identify the creative, inventive work of a composer not inside a single person, but rather at the intersection of the creative agencies of separate stakeholders in different roles, each with differing but definite investments in the invention process.

Furthermore, Lunsford and Ede were committed to investigating multiple participants’ invention influences not only in the study of other writers but also through the lens of collaboration and on the basis of their own collaborative work. Their 1983 article “Why Write… Together?” gives an account of their experiences as collaborators on academic articles, which they’ve expanded into a grant-funded research study and, more recently, the book Writing Together: Collaboration in Theory and Practice (2012). In their initial article, they acknowledge the challenges of working together (particularly at a time before widespread use of digital technologies made long-distance collaboration relatively easy). However, they note that when they approached collaboration strategically, they “were more likely to achieve a better understanding, generate potentially richer and fresher ideas, and develop a stronger overall argument than [they] might have done working alone” (155). They frame their discussion as a direct challenge of traditional conceptions of “creativity and originality,” noting that their “own strong sense that two may create ideas that neither would have reached alone argues for the value of dialectic as invention” (156). Through this study, I aim to build upon their “strong sense” of the impact of collaboration on invention through careful documentation of people’s influences on particular aspects of a webtext’s design.

Despite their clear excitement for and support of collaborative work, Ede and Lunsford recognize the significant challenges of collaborative work. As they observe in their 1986 continuation of the 1983 project, “Why Write… Together: A Research Update,” they could not immediately dive into an exploration of the benefits of collaboration until they addressed a more fundamental concern: “An analysis of the feasibility and efficiency of coauthorship and group authorship will be of little consequence, for instance, unless it addresses the powerful assumption, one particularly dominant in the humanities, of the link between individual genius, ‘originality’, authorship, and authority for a text” (71). This “powerful assumption” remains in many ways as powerful today as it did thirty years ago. I hope in this dissertation to highlight the many hands and minds involved in the webtext invention process to loosen this assumption’s grip just a bit more.