What Is College English? Stories about Reading: Appearance, Disappearance, Morphing, and Revival

A question that captured our attention many years ago and continues to motivate our work, although the audience for that work has expanded and contracted over the years, is “What about reading?” In this essay we adopt a term used to frame discussion at the 2010 CCCC “remix”to revisit in three ways the role of reading in composition studies: in terms of accepted constructions of disciplinary history (and the status of reader-response theory within that history), students (the erasure of “students” as a category of analysis), and the CCCC Convention program (the disappearance and reappearance of reading as a category of professional inquiry).