The Same Old Blindness

The latest issue of College English contains a review by Laura Brady entitled "Retelling the Composition-Literature Story." While Brady raises some interesting points, (and I agree with her that the composition-literature story needs to be retold) her choice of books for review and the substance of her review itself perpetuate an old problem and ignore a great deal of potentially important scholarship. The old problem she perpetuates is the view--simplistic to the extreme--of English studies as a bifurcated field, split only between literature and composition. The scholarship she ignores is that which points out that there is much more to English studies than literature and composition. Creative writing (to cite just one example) is rendered invisible when the field is simplistically conceived as being split between literature and composition. Is it really too much to ask that scholars stop reinforcing such old and problematic conceptions of English studies?