Response to Bizzell

The Bizzell article really touched on the boundaries of English and Composition. The restructuring of both academic subjects must be done across the board. As defined, the contact zone is a circumscribed in time and space, but with elastic boundaries.” It is my belief that both of these studies (literature and Composition) should go hand in hand. I cannot see how one could study English without either one of these. It would be similar to making a peanut butter sandwich with no jelly or vice versa. Bizzell makes a great argument on organizing genres historically. She gives a great detailed breakdown of her proposal:

For example, the New England region from about 1600 to about 1800 might

be defined as a contact zone in which different groups of Europeans and Native

Americans were struggling for the power to say what had happened in their

relations with each other. Thus canonical Puritan histories, autobiographies, and

captivity narratives would be studied in connection with historical commentaries

and memoirs by non-Puritan Europeans (traditionally treated as "minor"), European

transcriptions of Native American speeches (problematic but invaluable),

and letters, histories, and spiritual autobiographies written by Native Americans

in English (unknown in the academy until very recently). The object would not

be to represent what the lives of the diverse European immigrant and Native

American groups were really like. Rather, the attempt would be to show how each

group represented itself imaginatively in relation to the others. We would, in

effect, be reading all the texts as brought to the contact zone, for the purpose of

communicating across cultural boundaries.

I believe this could work, but I wonder how many years would it take to implement such doctrine across the board?