Writing against the Curriculum

Writing against the Curriculum responds to the growing popularity of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID) programs in universities and colleges across the United States. Many of these schools employ both an 'Introduction to Writing' course and a subsequent selection of writing-intensive courses housed within academic departments, thus simultaneously offering opportunities to subvert disciplinary knowledge production in the earlier course, even as they reaffirm those divisions in their later requirements. Written by administrators, faculty, and librarians at public and private institutions, who teach traditional and online introductory and advanced writing classes, the essays in Writing against the Curriculum argue that these introductory composition classrooms make excellent spaces to question disciplinarity through the study of rhetoric, with an emphasis on critical thinking and curricular flexibility, before students experience disciplinary enforcement most intensely in the advanced courses. Thus, this collection intervenes in current discourses of theory and practice in the related fields of composition and cultural studies because simultaneous attention to both fields enables both the activist enactment of cultural studies' theoretical ambitions and the interrogation of the theoretical and political implications of composition practices.