MY DISCIPLINARY HISTORY: A Personal Account

Those of us who have spent the last part of the twentieth century and the first part of the twenty-first century teaching and studying writing have experienced careers characterized, pretty continuously, by discussion of the legitimacy of our endeavor. Like those of so many of our generation, my career has also been marked by the constant debates and discussions about the both the definition and the place of Writing Studies.¹ While countless numbers of these debates have taken place in our own academic units and universities, the discussion also seems to be an endless part of a much larger national