Patrick Scott
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA AT COLUMBIA

There are two good reasons for compositionists now to look carefully at
the bibliographical resources in the discipline. First, the resources have
changed, and improved, a great deal in the past few years ¹ On a prac-
tical level, the enormous growth in research and commentary on com-
position is quite unmanageable if we are unfamiliar with these improved
resources. But, second, the problems that composition bibliographers
have faced, and the ways they have faced them, tell us a lot about the
knowledge-structure (and social structure) of the discipline. By viewing
composition through the speculum of its bibliographical structures, we
see more sharply how the emergence of modern composition studies has
precipitated new configurations of people, purposes, and disciplinary
traditions; indeed, its very bibliographical intractability is one of our
best clues to the special character of composition's goals and perspec-
tives.

At first sight, composition and bibliography would seem culturally anti-
thetical. Compositionists typically have stressed the role of discourse in
sharing or shaping or creating a world, while bibliographers have typ-
ically seen themselves as value-free technicians, who through imper-
sonal labor enable other researchers to locate all the particles of a
preexistent knowledge.

Indeed, for many years, bibliography in composition was simply a
non-problem, because few people (at least in English departments)

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