NOTE: Though you should feel free to address these questions with any of your readings, your essay should reflect a comprehensive reading of the CompRhet Core List.

The May 2008 faculty-authored prelim questions will remain in effect through August 2010.

1. Where is the rhetoric in rhetoric and composition?

2. Composition and Rhetoric has long borrowed its methods from other fields and disciplines. Drawing on the core list, consider what C&R's methods are and how these methods become or do not become distinctive to the field.

The May 2007 faculty-authored prelim questions will remain in effect through August 2009.

1. How are the politics of language expressed in the field of composition and rhetoric?

2. What is the role of conflict in writing?

May 2006 faculty-authored prelim questions. (Must be completed by August 2008)

1. As you have come to understand the field of composition and rhetoric, what are the serious mistakes, gaps or lost opportunities in our theory, research, and/or methodologies? What might account for them? How might they be redressed? Or, more succintly: What time is it in composition
and rhetoric?

2. In what ways is writing organized by circumstance? And how do our answers to that question impact our theories, practices, and pedagogies?

May 2005-2006 (Must be completed by May 2007)

1. When and why is writing hard?

2. How, when, and why did Composition & Rhetoric come to be a scholarlyand institutionalized discipline in postsecondary American departments of English? What configuration of interests propelled it to become the field it is? And what does the character of our core reading list itself tell us about the nature of our field?

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