UNDERSTANDING THE NATURE OF DISCIPLINARITY IN TERMS OF COMPOSITION’S VALUES

Composition Studies’ path to disciplinary standing in the academy has been lengthened and complicated by the reticence of some of its practitioners to embrace the notion of disciplinarity and all that might entail.¹ Over a period of several decades, many of the field’s leading lights expressed discomfort with disciplinarity, which they perceived as modernist, hegemonic, stultifying, limiting, and possibly even unethical. Yet, as this collection argues, disciplinarity offers institutional standing crucial to the development of a field of study and to the ability of its participants to make meaningful change in the areas they study. Mary Boland (2007) frames this