Current theories of radical pedagogy stress the constant undermining, on the part of both professors and students, of fixed essential identities. This article examines the way three feminist, queer teachers of writing experience and perform their gender, class, and sexual identities. We critique both the academy’s tendency to neutralize the political aspects of identity performance and the essentialist identity politics that still inform many academic discussions.

This article asserts that personal essays by black feminist writers such as June Jordan might be used to teach first-year and advanced student writers how to connect their personal and social identities in ways that will enhance the rhetorical impact of their writing while transcending mere “confession” or self-indulgence.

I value Gypsy Academics and the compassionate way in which Schell combines a feminist and materialist analysis of the historical and economic conditions that have led to the exploitation of adjunct faculty, the majority of whom are women. - College EnglishFully two-thirds of all part-time teachers in English studies are women, many with no permanent faculty standing, no benefits, no job security, and little or no chance for promotion. How does the feminization of writing programs affect the newly formed discipline of rhetoric and composition? Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers illuminates the complex gendered ideologies that surround writing instruction--drawing on feminist theories of women's work, Marxist theories of class and labor, sociological and economic studies of part-time academic employment, and personal interviews with part-time women writing faculty. Eileen Schell contends that part-time faculty members' interests and contributions have been underrepresented in our research narratives and professional histories in rhetoric and composition. Her book attempts to revalue practitioner knowledge and to reclaim the voices and perspectives of part-time women writing instructors as a vital part of the history and growth of rhetoric and composition as a discipline. Both a theoretical and practical study, Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers not only theorizes the structures of gender and labor in writing programs; it also offers administrators, theorists, and practitioners ideas for improving the working conditions and professional status of part-time writing instructors.

In short, Cheryl Glenn’s Rhetoric Retold asks nothing less than that we consider what the history of rhetoric is and (more importantly) what it ought to be.

This article examines the work of Marian Wharton, a socialist and feminist who helped shape the English curriculum at the People’s College in Fort Scott, Kansas, from 1914 to 1917. While other historical projects on writing instruction have focused on women working at or in alliance with elite eastern colleges, Wharton operated outside the traditional academy at a site where the empowerment of the working class was the explicit goal of writing and language instruction. By exploring tensions in Wharton’s work, I hope to develop a rich, historically-situated conception of how the rhetorical activities of women and other marginalized people are a complex interweaving of alliance and antagonism, of free choice and restricted options, of accomplishment and failure.

Composition (at its best) and feminism work against the grain of conventional institutional practices. Both challenge assumptions and seek to transform ways of thinking, teaching, and learning. Both are complex, containing different agendas and different voices. Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words is a feminist project that boldly places at its center differences among women. Topics discussed include American history, politics, language, racism, pedagogy, contingent labor in the teaching of writing, e-mail behavior, and the need for educational and institutional reform. Teachers, graduate students, program administrators, and feminists will find valuable the critiques, theoretical as well as personal, contained in this unusually honest and thought-provoking volume.

Placed within the context of the academic environment, this multi-focused book identifies students as active contributors and learners; faculty as researchers, teachers, and learners; and administrators as a synthesis of all three modes of collaboration. While focusing on the mutuality of educational enterprises, Common Ground raises provocative questions about the dynamics of gender and cooperation at various levels of academia. It reveals the transformative power of collaboration by challenging traditional notions of single authorship and beliefs about knowledge as individually owned and acquired. By offering different perspectives on feminism and collaboration, this book establishes the basis for re-thinking Romantic notions about creativity, re-conceptualizing conventional ideas regarding competition, and re-reading traditional hierarchies and authoritarian relationships.

Molly Abel Travis unites theory with an analysis historical conditions various cultural contexts this discussion reading reception twentieth-century literature United States. Travis moves beyond such provisional conclusions as the produces reader or the produces text considers ways twentieth-century readers texts attempt to constitute appropriate each other at particular cultural moments according to specific psychosocial exigencies. She uses overarching concept in and out of both to differentiate implied by from actual to discuss such in-and-out movements that occur process reading as alternation between immersion interactivity between role playing unmasking. Unlike most theorists, Travis is concerned with agency reader. Her conception agency reading is informed by performance, psychoanalytic, feminist theories. This agency involves compulsive, reiterative performance which readers attempt to find themselves by going outside selfengaging literary role playing hope finally fully identifying self through self-differentiation. Furthermore, readers never escape a social context; they are both constructed actively constructing that they read as part interpretive communities are involved collaborative creativity or what Kendall Walton calls collective imagining.

A s a field of professional inquiry intertwined with the practice and teaching of its own subject, composition studies has enjoyed the steady pace of its own recent evolution.Few composition scholars twenty years ago would have imagined the rate at which the field is now developing, exploding beyond its boundaries, creating new alliances, and locating new sites for inquiry and knowledge production.These current transformations owe in part to the inevitable burgeoning of a theoretically interdisciplinary field with a strong orientation toward self-reflection.They also owe to unprecedented changes underway in higher education, changes pressured by shifts in the politics and economics of university administration, the advent of new technologies, population changes that affect student demographics, and the creation of alternative structures and contexts for teaching and learning.Composition, in seeking a disciplinary identity, is questioning the ways it creates and mediates knowledge and the ways in which that knowledge informs and is informed by various contexts for research and practice.This collection focuses on the ways in which composition reconsiders established dichotomies, examines new connections among areas of inquiry, and suggests avenues for inquiry that have transformative consequences for the sites of theory, research, and teaching.When we first proposed this volume of essays, we sought submissions that reconsidered the relationship among theory, research and practice, expecting that our focus would primarily be on the changing face of composition research.Our open call and invitation to individual scholars, however, resulted in very few reports of research studies, but rather in contributions that reflect the extent to which the theory/research/practice relationship now occupies our disciplinary thinking.Since the publication of Stephen North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (1987), the past decade has seen attention to research methodology largely displaced by conflict between theory and practice.This conflict, still rooted, one might argue, in the desire for a unified theory, often centers on the extent to which any theory employed by compositionists must grow, if not from research, then from practice, or at least edgment of "what is contradictory, and perhaps unknowable" (9).Many of the authors in this volume (Rose and Lauer; Chiang; Grimm, et al.; Okawa) build into their essays acknowledgement of their positions as scholars and researchers and examine their "findings" as cultural and ideological products.At that same time, some of them are quick to point out the limits and consequences of new theories and methodologies for composition as a disciplinary community (Seitz; MacDonald; Neff; Ray and Barton).Increasingly, compositionists have more confidence in the recognition that teaching makes knowledge, and that practice, overdetermined as it is, continually calls into question the traditional purpose of theory-to explain unaccounted-for phenomena and solve new problems.Lore, as North distinguishes it from traditional disciplinary knowledge production, can, Harkin argues, be thought of as postdisciplinary theory, because it allows for practitioners' often contradictory attempts to solve writing problems with more than one cause, rather than using theory in the traditional way to contain situations (134).Beth Daniell has argued that while composition theories may lack the authority to dictate pedagogy, as rhetoric, they are what persuade us to teach writing in the ways that we do (130).At the same time that theories may contain the discipline by "serving the interests of . . .groups within that discipline" (131), they are what enable us, she says, to "create a community in which we can figure out what we, individually and collectively, believe about our work" (135).In that rhetorical and political sense, theory is practice.But, as several of the authors in this volume (Ferry; Vandenberg; Howard) ask, whose "work" and whose interests define us and remain at the center of composition as a discipline?Can theory, research, and practice in ever new relationships intersect and hold an expanding community together or drive it apart into separate communities whose power and authority may be in jeopardy?Composition's calling into question its knowledge comes at a time when the authority of that expert knowledge may be at risk.In the wake of shrinking graduate programs and the responsibility-centered-management of academic departments in the new corporate universities, the literature components of some English departments are beginning to reclaim an expertise in the teaching of writing or, in some instances, to efface that expertise, deeming it no longer necessary, politically appropriate, or cost-effective.Much composition scholarship in fact contributes to this withering away of the more public conception of composition.Our growing understanding of complex context-specific literacy practices runs counter to institutional conditions that assume composition is an essential set of transparent skills to be conveyed one-time-only to first year students by exploited instructors.If retooled writing courses do result from the disciplinary boundary crossing of compositionists into deconstruction, feminist, multicultural, and cultural studies, what in the experiences of teachers and students justifies or interrogates these theories in practice?How does interdisciplinary inquiry expand avenues and change how and what we research and teach?What locates theorists, courses, teachers, and programs that might grow from this research within "composition"?Several of the authors in this volume locate their concerns about composition's "identity crisis" in a disjuncture between theory and pedagogy, whether questioning composition's attempts to achieve more disciplinary status (Ferry; Vandenberg; Howard) or its failure to focus more attention on knowledgebuilding inside the field (MacDonald; Neff).

Preview this article: Feminism in Composition: Inclusion, Metonymy, and Disruption, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/50/4/collegecompositioncommunication1349-1.gif

Inviting Theory - From Formalism to Cultural Studies Formalism - Structure and Idea in M.C. Higgins, Great Archetypes - the Monomyth in Dogsong Structuralism - Decoding Signs in The Moves Make the Man Deconstruction - Unravelling The Giver Reader-Response - Identity Themes in Fallen Angels Feminism - Mother/Daughter Transformations in The Leaving Black Aesthetics - Signifyin(g) in A Lesson Before Dying Cultural Studies - Social Construction and AIDS in Night Kites Theory as Prism - Multiple Readings in Jacob Have I Loved End Thoughts - Inviting Theory.

Acknowledgments -- Words and women in the evangelical community -- Hymns as the cultural property of nineteenth-century women -- His religion and hers -- Women's hymns as narrative models -- The patriarchal backlash.

Making Relationships: Gender in the Forming of Academic Community presents two case studies of student-teacher writing conferences to make visible what is usually invisible in academe: the personal. It shows that successful academic community may be most easily achieved by students and teachers who create relationships marked by masculine themes and values - and that this may be true even when the teacher is a feminist woman. If change is to occur, the author argues, compositionists must rethink both contemporary composition and gender theories and develop new ways of representing narrative and other expressive discourses.

Contents: Part I:Theory, Language, Rhetoric. C. Schuster, Mikhail Bakhtin as Rhetorical Theorist (1985). R.A. Harris, Bakhtin, Phaedrus, and the Geometry of Rhetoric (1988). J. Klancher, Bakhtin's Rhetoric (1989). T. Kent, Hermeneutics and Genre: Bakhtin and the Problem of Communicative Interaction (1991). K. Halasek, Feminism and Bakhtin: Dialogic Reading in the Academy (1992). M. Bernard-Donals, Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism (1994). M. Cooper, Dialogic Learning Across Disciplines (1994). K. Halasek, M. Bernard-Donals, D. Bialostosky, J.T. Zebroski, Bakhtin and Rhetorical Criticism: A Symposium (1992). Part II:Composition Studies, Pedagogy, Research. J.S. Ritchie, Beginning Writers: Diverse Voices and Individual Identity (1989). J.J. Comprone, Textual Perspectives on Collaborative Learning: Dialogic Literacy and Written Texts in Composition Classrooms (1989). G.A. Cross, A Bakhtinian Exploration of Factors Affecting the Collaborative Writing of an Executive Letter of an Annual Report (1990). D.H. Bialostosky, Liberal Education, Writing, and the Dialogic Self (1991). T. Recchio, A Bakhtinian Reading of Student Writing (1991). M. Middendorf, Bakhtin and the Dialogic Writing Class (1992). N. Welch, One Student's Many Voices: Reading, Writing, and Responding With Bakhtin (1993). H.R. Ewald, Waiting for Answerability: Bakhtin and Composition Studies (1993).

This study examines theoretical conceptions of community and how current communitarian theories either explain or are challenged by the emergence of electronic discussion groups in the computer-mediated communication (CMC) medium. It is a study of the power to monitor what is said, to authorize who may speak, and even to determine what is and is not knowable within the context of discourse communities and, furthermore, seeks to test the claim that CMC may serve as an agency for communal change by enabling the formation of resisting subjectivities. A poststructuralist analysis of approaches to "community" is used to show how communitarian theories are often caught in a binary between subjectivities which are able to resist interpellation into a community by appealing to universals outside the community versus subjectivities which are forced to accommodate the discursive practices of the community because they are constituted by it. In order to better understand the process of subject formation within communities, the discursive practices of an electronic discussion group known as PURTOPOI are examined. Utilizing observations based on the examination of PURTOPOI and using insights from feminist standpoint theory, this project ultimately argues for a revised view of subjectivity within discourse communities. It is impossible to avoid the discursive practices of particular communities; yet, resistance and conflict are, paradoxically, required to maintain group unity. Thus, communities are both unified and sites of struggle. Communities are never unities because as soon as they become unified, as soon as they realize total consensus, they cease to function as communities; there's no communication within them any longer so that the forces which bind their members together into a community are gone. Thus, there can never be a community which is completely successful in forcing its members to accommodate its discursive practices, nor can there ever be a community which is completely without hegemony. Both resistance and accommodation must be present in order for there to be a community. This calls into question the claim that CMC may serve as an agency for communal change by enabling the formation of resisting subjectivities because it suggests that CMC is too indebted to the discursive practices of other established media to produce radical new subjectivities.

This work collects together the writings of Gertrude Buck (known for her work on the history of composition), aiming to show her thoughts on rhetorical theory, some selections from her textbooks on argumentative and expository writing, her poetry and fiction, and a play, Mother-Love.

These essays by Old Dominion University students deal with two questions: What impact do their own race, class, gender, and ethnic identities have upon them as students? How do their culture and the university culture interact to affect their ability to learn?The focus of these essays is on the overlap between the students identities as students and their identities based on gender, race, class, and ethnic origin. The project began as an assignment in a women s studies class at Old Dominion University in 1993, when students in a mixed graduate and undergraduate course were asked to write a brief analysis of themselves as students, accounting for the impact of gender, race, and social class on what they studied, what they heard in class, how they were treated in the classroom, how they treated others there, and what their level of comfort in the university was. Invited to add other variables, such as religion, nationality, age, sexual orientation, or disability if they considered these significant to their identities as studentsthe students were urged to consider not only the disadvantages these various identities gave them but also the privileges and advantages.The resulting essays stimulated great interest in what students had to say and led to the formation of The Broad Minds Collectivemade up of four students from the class as well as its instructorwhich set about the task of soliciting and collecting additional essays. Although most essays contain overlapping themes, the editors detected four motifs that encompass virtually every essay included in the book. the section Cultural Perceptions and Assumptions, students show their awareness of how culturally defined categories affect education.Essays in Belonging and Alienation in the Classroom discuss the students level of comfort in the classroom and the degree to which they feel they belong at the university. The essays in Making Sense of Our Lives Through Education reveal the students use of education to learn more about the forces that shape them. In Search of an Education highlights students efforts to wrest what they feel they need from a college education.Rather than presenting a multicultural educational theory or conducting a sterile sociological study, The Broad Minds Collective has allowed students to speak for themselves. Abstraction is replaced by stories of personal conflict, struggle, and victory.

One of the few authors to define and focus on feminist theories of rhetoric, Krista Ratcliffe takes Bathsheba s dilemma as her controlling metaphor: I have the feelings of a woman, says Bathsheba Everdene in Hardy s Far from the Madding Crowd, only the language of men. Although women and men have different relationships to language and to each other, traditional theories of rhetoric do not foreground such gender differences, Ratcliffe notes. She argues that feminist theories of rhetoric are needed if we are to recognize, validate, and address Bathsheba s dilemma. Ratcliffe argues that because feminists generally have not conceptualized their language theories from the perspective of rhetoric and composition studies, rhetoric and composition scholars must construct feminist theories of rhetoric by employing a variety of interwoven strategies: recovering lost or marginalized texts; rereading traditional rhetoric texts; extrapolating rhetorical theories from such nonrhetoric texts as letters, diaries, essays, cookbooks, and other sources; and constructing their own theories of rhetoric. Focusing on the third option, Ratcliffe explores ways in which the rhetorical theories of Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, and Adrienne Rich may be extrapolated from their Anglo-American feminist texts through examination of the interrelationship between what these authors write and how they write. In other words, she extrapolates feminist theories of rhetoric from interwoven claims and textual strategies. By inviting Woolf, Daly, and Rich into the rhetorical traditions and by modeling the extrapolation strategy/methodology on their writings, Ratcliffe shows how feminist texts about women, language, and culture may be reread from the vantage point of rhetoric to construct feminist theories of rhetoric. She rereads Anglo-American feminist texts both to expose their white privilege and to rescue them from charges of naivete and essentialism. She also outlines the pedagogical implications of these three feminist theories of rhetoric, thus contributing to ongoing discussions of feminist pedagogies. Traditional rhetorical theories are gender-blind, ignoring the reality that women and men occupy different cultural spaces and that these spaces are further complicated by race and class, Ratcliffe explains. Arguing that issues such as who can talk, where one can talk, and how one can talk emerge in daily life but are often disregarded in rhetorical theories, Ratcliffe rereads Roland Barthes The Old Rhetoric to show the limitations of classical rhetorical theories for women and feminists. Discovering spaces for feminist theories of rhetoric in the rhetorical traditions, Ratcliffe invites readers not only to question how women have been located as a part of and apart from these traditions but also to explore the implications for rhetorical history, theory, and pedagogy. In extrapolating rhetorical theories from three feminist writers not generally considered rhetoricians, Ratcliffe creates a new model for examining women s work. She situates the rhetorical theories of Woolf, Daly, and Rich within current discussions about feminist pedagogy, particularly the interweavings of critical thinking, reading, and writing. Ratcliffe concludes with an application to teaching.

These essays examine: how women have used language to reflect their vision of themselves and their age; how they have used traditional rhetoric and applied it to women's discourse; and how women have contributed to rhetorical theory.

n the introduction to The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875-1925, John Brereton remarks that few signs exist of explicitly feminist rhetoric texts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, despite the presence of many women composition teachers in America at this time. While Brereton acknowledges the contributions of women professors who authored innovative textbooks (the first reader to use student papers, by Francis Campbell Berkeley, for example, as well as one of the first handbooks, by Luella Clay Carson), he argues that feminist rhetoric texts are conspicuously absent from the history of rhetoric and composition. Brereton asks to what extent publishing houses may have restricted explicitly feminist modes of writing and speaking instruction. He suggests that feminist rhetoric texts and pedagogies by women during this period perhaps operated in a more subversive fashion, reflecting the conservative climate of the time, and he suggests that women's rhetoric texts (as well as their pedagogical artifacts) ought to be read in terms of the climate of the historical moment (20-21). With Brereton's remarks in mind, I wish to discuss Mary Augusta Jordan's Correct Writing and Speaking, a rhetoric text authored for women who studied writing and speaking outside of the formal academy. Jordan (1855-1941) is a rhetorician to be added to the list of other remarkable women professors who wrote textbooks for new audiences at this time. Her work makes a con-

[This book] is a must for those committed to voicing the personal conflicts writers experience and to turning those confusing and sometimes dismaying moments into productive sites for questioning textual relations. - Journal of Advanced CompositionIn Getting Restless, Nancy Welch calls for a reconception of what we mean by revision, urging compositionists to rethink long-held beliefs about teacher-student relations and writing practices. Drawing primarily on feminist and psychoanalytic theories, she considers how revision can be redefined not as a process of increasing orientations toward a particular thesis or discourse community, but instead as a process of disorientation: an act of getting restless with received meanings, familiar relationships, and disciplinary or generic boundaries--a practice of intervening in the meanings and identifications of one's text and one's life. Using ethnographic, case-study, and autobiographical research methods, Welch maintains two consistent aims throughout the study: to show how composition teachers can create for themselves and for their students environments that encourage and support revision as restlessness and as a process of intervening in a first draft's thoroughly social meanings and identifications to demonstrate how composition's process legacy is revitalized when we understand that our means to form and change communities- to form and change constructions of authority--are located in revision. In achieving these ends Welch examines three academic sites: a campus writing center, undergraduate writing classrooms, and a summer workshop for K-12 teachers. This book will appeal to a wide audience, including classroom and writing center teachers, historians and theorists in composition and rhetoric, feminist theorists, and those engaged in literacy studies, teacher education, and connections/tensions among teaching, writing, and psychoanalysis.

Preview this article: Subversive Feminism: The Politics of Correctness in Mary Augusta Jordan's Correct Writing and Speaking (1904), Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/48/4/collegecompositionandcommunication3164-1.gif

Introduction - Barbara Emmel, Paula Resch, and Deborah Tenney ARGUMENT REVISITED The Reasoned Thesis - John T Gage The E-Word and Argumentative Writing as a Process of Inquiry Evidence as a Creative Act - Barbara Emmel An Epistemology of Argumentative Inquiry The Toulmin Model of Argument and the Teaching of Composition - Richard Fulkerson Rogerian Rhetoric - Doug Brent Ethical Growth through Alternative Forms of Argumentation Classical Rhetoric - Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor The Art of Argumentation ARGUMENT REDEFINED Positioning Oneself - Pamela J Annas and Deborah Tenney A Feminist Approach to Argument Principles for Propagation - Judith Summerfield On Narrative and Argument The 'Argument of Reading' in the Teaching of Composition - Mariolina Salvatori The Argument of Reading - David Bartholomae

Acknowledgments Introductions Standard at the University of Texas by Alan W. Friedman Political Correctness, Principled Contextualism, Pedagogical Conscience by Evan Carton Canonicity, Subalternity, and Literary Pedagogy Pedagogy and the Canon Controversy by Jacqueline Bacon A Multicultural Curriculum: Diversity or Divisiveness? by Helena Woodard Rereading Texas History: Cultural Impoverishment, Empowerment, and Pedagogy by Louis Mendoza English Literature, the Irish, and The Norton Anthology by Rachel Jennings The Thumb of Ekalavya: Postcolonial Studies and the Third World Scholar in a First World Academy by S. Shankar Reclaiming the Teaching Assistant: Dissent as a Pedagogical Tool by Jean Lee Cole and Jennifer Huth Reading, Writing, Teaching: Principles and Provocations Warranting a Postmodernist Literary Studies by Gordon A. Grant III Knowledge, Power, and the Melancholy of Studies by Robert G. Twombly Collaborative Learning in the Postmodern Classroom by Jerome Bump Professionalism and the Problem of the We in Composition Studies by Nancy Peterson An Accidental Writing Teacher by Sara E. Kimball Having Students Write on Moral Topics: Legal, Religious, and Pedagogical Issues by James L. Kinneavy Bodies, Sexualities, and Computers in the Classroom Desire and Learning: The Perversity of Pedagogy by Kathleen Kane Learning and Desire: A Pedagogical Model by Edward Madden Gender and Trauma in the Classroom by Margot Backus Type Normal Like the Rest of Us: Writing, Power, and Homophobia in the Networked Composition Classroom by Alison Regan Rethinking Pedagogical Authority in Response to Homophobia in the Networked Classroom by Susan Claire Warshauer Here, Queer, and Perversely Sincere: Lesbian Subjects in the Department by Kim Emery Works Cited Index

Contents: C. Murphy, J. Law, Introduction: Landmark Essays on Writing Centers (1994). Part I:Historical Perspectives. R.H. Moore, The Writing Clinic and the Writing Laboratory (1950). L. Kelly, One-on-One, Iowa City Style: Fifty Years of Individualized Instruction in Writing (1980). M. Harris, What's Up and What's In: Trends and Traditions in Writing Centers (1990). P. Carino, What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Our Metaphors: A Cultural Critique of Clinic, Lab and Center (1992). G. Olson, E. Ashton-Jones, Writing Center Directors: The Search for Professional Status (1984). J. Simpson, What Lies Ahead for Writing Centers: Position Statement on Professional Concerns (1985). J. Summerfield, Writing Centers: A Long View (1988). Part II:Theoretical Foundations. S.M. North, The Idea of a Writing Center (1984). K.A. Bruffee, Peer Tutoring and the Conversation of Mankind (1984). L. Ede, Writing as a Social Process: A Theoretical Foundation for Writing Centers? (1989). A. Lunsford, Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center (1991). C. Murphy, Writing Centers in Context: Responding to Current Educational Theory (1991). A.M. Gillam, Writing Center Ecology: A Bakhtinian Perspective (1991). M. Cooper, Really Useful Knowledge: A Cultural Studies Agenda for Writing Centers (1994). Part III:Writing Center Praxis. J. Simpson, S. Braye, B. Boquet, War, Peace, and Writing Center Administration. D. Healy, A Defense of Dualism: The Writing Center and the Classroom (1993). R. Wallace, The Writing Center's Role in the Writing Across the Curriculum Program: Theory and Practice (1989). R. Leahy, Writing Centers and Writing-for-Learning (1989). H. Kail, J. Trimbur, The Politics of Peer Tutoring (1987). A. DiPardo, Whispers of Coming and Going: Lessons From Fannie (1992). M. Woolbright, The Politics of Tutoring: Feminism Within the Patriarchy (1992).

Preface Part I. THEORY 1. Rhetoric and Popular Culture The Rhetoric of Everyday Life The Building Blocks of Culture: Signs 2. Rhetoric and the Rhetorical Tradition The Rhetorical Tradition: Ancient Greece 3. Rhetorical Methods in Critical Studies Texts Influence through Meanings 4. Varieties of Rhetorical Criticism, part one An Introduction to Critical Perspectives Culture-centered Criticism Marxist Criticism Visual Rhetorical Criticism Psychoanalytic Criticism 5. Varieties of Rhetorical Criticism, part two Feminist Criticism Dramatistic/Narrative Criticism Media-centered Criticism Summary and Review Looking Ahead Part II. APPLICATION 6. Paradoxes of Personalization: Race Relations in Milwaukee The Problem of Personalization The Scene and Focal Events 7. On Gangsta, Written with the Help of the Reader False Claim #1: African American Culture Is Violent False Claim #2: African American Culture Is Sexual False Claim #3: African American Culture Is Crassly Materialistic Conclusion 8. Simulational Selves, Simulational Culture in Groundhog Day 9. Media and Representation in Rec.Motorcycles 10. Two Homological Critiques One: Opening my iPod nano: A homological study of media and discourse Two: Queering the Gecko: Race, Sexual Orientation, and Marginality in GEICO's Cavemen Suggested Readings Index

Preview this article: Feminism and Scientism, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/46/3/collegecompositioncommunication8732-1.gif

Gary A. Olson presents six in-depth interviews with internationally prominent scholars outside of the discipline and twelve response essays written by noted rhetoric and composition scholars on subjects related to language, rhetoric, writing, philosophy, feminism, and literary criticism. The interviews are with philosopher of language Donald Davidson, literary critic and critical legal studies scholar Stanley Fish, cultural studies and African American studies scholar bell hooks, internationally renowned deconstructionist J. Hillis Miller, feminist literary critic Jane Tompkins, and British logician and philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin. Susan Wells and Reed Way Dasenbrock provide distinctly divergent assessments of the application of Donald Davidson s language theory to rhetoric and composition, and especially to writing pedagogy. Patricia Bizzell and John Trimbur explore how Stanley Fish s neopragmatism might be useful both to composition theory and to literacy education. And Joyce Irene Middleton and Tom Fox discuss bell hooks s notions of how race and gender affect pedagogy. In two frank and sometimes angry responses, Patricia Harkin and Jasper Neel take J. Hillis Miller to task for seeming to support rhetoric and composition while continuing to maintain the political status quo. Similarly, Susan C. Jarratt and Elizabeth A. Flynn express skepticism about Jane Tompkins s vocal support of composition and of radical pedagogy particularly. And Arabella Lyon and C. Jan Swearingen analyze Stephen Toulmin s thoughts on argumentation and postmodernism. Internationally respected anthropologist Clifford Geertz provides a foreword; literacy expert Patricia Bizzell contributes an introduction to the text; and noted reader-response critic David Bleich supplies critical commentary. This book is a follow-up to the editor s (Inter)views: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Rhetoric and Literacy, already a major work of scholarship in the field.

A pragmatic work that begins with analyses of experimental expository prose, avant-garde feminist poetics, African American discourse, hypertext, and other innovative discourse influences, and goes on to present a series of proposals intended for teachers, theorists, graduate students, and administr

This collection of sixteen essays, authored by major scholars in the field of composition and rhetoric, offers an eclectic range of opinions, perspectives, and interpretations regarding the place of composition studies in its academic context. Covering the history of rhetoric and composition from the nineteenth century to the present, the collection focuses on the institutional and intellectual framework of the discipline while honoring Donald C. Stewart, a man who addressed the central paradox of the field: its homelessness as a discipline in an academic community that prides itself on specialization.Over the past two decades composition grounded in rhetorical tradition has emerged as a foundation for liberal and professional studies. These essays, furthering the often disputed point that composition is indeed a discipline, are divided into three parts that examine three crucial questions: What is the history of composition s context? How does composition function within its context? How should we interpret or reinterpret this context?In the first part, the essayists investigate the history of composition teaching, noting the formative influences of the eighteenth-century Scottish rhetoricians in the development of the American tradition as well as the effect of composition on education in general. The essayists question the public perception of rhetoric as the art of flimflam and examine the rise of expressive writing at the expense of argumentation and persuasion.In part 2, the contributors make clear that composition is a discipline in the process of defining itself. They explore the role composition plays in universities and the ways in which it seeks focus and purpose, as well as formal justification for its existence.In the last section, the authors scan the very edge of the field of composition and rhetoric, from examinations of the nature of the composing imagination and of the question of dialogue as communication to feminist theoretical approaches that attempt to bridge the differences between the New Romantics and New Rhetoricians composing models. The essays are enhanced by the coeditors witty and perceptive introduction and by Vincent Gillespie s tribute to Donald Stewart.

In this critical history of the gendered politics of rhetoric and the rise of composition, Miriam Brody argues that nothing about words or their arrangement is innately gendered. Yet since the English Enlightenment, teachers have encouraged their students to admire and imitate manly writing, writing that is plain, forceful, cogent, and true. Similarly, students have been enjoined to avoid so-called effeminate or feminine writingwriting characterized as vague, unorganized, ornate, and deceitful.Such advice, part of what Brody terms the hidden curriculum, has served the interests of discourse communities as various as the early Enlightenment Royal Society in seventeenth-century London (by urging a clear and masculine style for the work of science) and the land-grant universities of nineteenth-century America (by claiming that the work of writing was similar to clearing the land and pushing back the frontier). Brody s discussion in fact becomes a social history of canonical rhetorical essays and important late Enlightenment, nineteenth-century, and early modern school texts. She points out that in their advice to writers even the Strunks and Whites and Peter Elbows of more recent times have extolled masculine virtues and urged control over invasive and problematic feminine qualities.Brody s book not only clarifies rhetoric s inheritance and transformation of the classical ideal of manliness, it also is the first critical work to explore the ideological significance of gendered imagery and to interpret in light of this imagery rhetorical essays and hard-to-locate early composition texts against a background of previously unpublished archival materials.

The United States is at a crucial moment in the history of literacy, a time when how well Americans read is the subject of newspaper headlines. In this insightful book, Carl F. Kaestle and his colleagues shed new light on this issue, providing a social history of literacy in America that broadens the definition of literacy and considers who was reading what, under what circumstances, and for what purposes. The book explores diverse sources-from tests of reading ability, government surveys, and polls to nineteenth-century autobiographies and family budget studies-in order to assess trends in Americans' reading abilities and reading habits. It investigates such topics as the relation of literacy to gender, race, ethnicity, and income; the magnitude, causes, and policy implications of the decline in test scores in the early 1970s; the reasons women's magazines have been more successful than magazines for men; and whether print technology has fostered cultural diversity or consolidation. It concludes that there has been an immense expansion of literacy in America over the past century, against which the modest skill declines of the 1970s pale by comparison. There has also been tremendous growth in the availability, purchase, and use of printed materials. In recent decades, however, literacy has leveled and even declined in some areas of reading, as shown in the downward trends in purchases of newspapers and magazines. Since Americans are now being lured away from the print media by electronic media, say the authors, current worries about Americans' literacy levels may well be justified.

In original essays, fourteen nationally known scholars examine the practical, philosophical, and epistemological implications of a variety of research traditions. Included are discussions of historical, theoretical, and feminist scholarship; case-study and ethnographic research; text and conversation analysis; and cognitive, experimental, and descriptive research. Issues that cross methodological boundaries, such as the nature of collaborative research and writing, methodological pluralism, the classification and coding of research data, and the politics of composition research, are also examined. Contributors reflect on their own research practices, and so reflect the current state of composition research itself.

This book is a critically informed challenge to the traditional histories of rhetoric to the current emphasis on Aristotle Plato as the most significant classical voices in rhetoric. In it, Susan C. Jarratt argues that the first sophistsa diverse group of traveling intellectuals in the fifth century B.C.should be given a more prominent place in the study of rhetoric composition. Rereading the ancient sophists, she creates a new lens through which to see contemporary social issues, including the orality/literacy debate, feminist writing, deconstruction, writing pedagogy.The sophists pleasure in the play of language, their focus on historical contin-gency, the centrality of their teaching for democratic practice were sufficiently threatening to their successors Plato Aristotle that both sought to bury the sophists under philosophical theories of language. The censure of Plato Aris-totle set a pattern for historical views of the sophists for centuries. Following Hegel Nietzsche, Jarratt breaks the pattern, finding in the sophists a more progressive charter for teachers scholars of reading writing, as well as for those in the adjacent disciplines of literary criticism theory, education, speech communication, ancient history.In tracing the historical interpretations of sophistic rhetoric, Jarratt suggests that the sophists themselves provide the outlines of an alternative to history-writing as the discovery recounting of a set of stable facts. She sees sophistic use of narrative in argument as a challenge to a simple division between orality literacy, current discussions of which virtually ignore the sophists. Outlining similarities between ecriture feminine and sophistic style, Jarratt shows that contemporary feminisms have more in common with sophists than just a style; they share a rhetorical basis for deployment of theory in political action. In her final chapter, Jarratt takes issue with accounts of sophistic pedagogy focusing on technique the development of the individual. She argues that, despite its employment by powerful demagogues, sophistic pedagogy offers a resource for today s teachers interested in encouraging minority voices of resistance through language study as the practice of democracy.

If workshop time permits, presenting faculty with the theory behind the pedagogical suggestions is helpful in convincing them to adopt these techniques. One might briefly introduce the major studies of women's moral, psychological and intellectual development, as well as recent feminist epistemological theories which have begun to influence feminist compositionists. In The Reproduction of Mothering Nancy Chodorow argues that women's continuing identification with the mother makes connected, interpersonal relationships central to their sense of self and representations of their lives. Men, on the other hand, spend a great amount of psychic energy separating themselves from the mother, and a process of isolated individuation is central to their development. Similarly, Carol Gilligan maintains, in In a Different Voice, that women's morality is based on relationships and their contexts rather than adherence to abstract principles of right. In Women's Ways ofKnowing, Mary Field Belenky and her co-authors have

In classes ranging from Advanced Expository and Women and at the undergraduate level to Gender, Language, and Writing Pedagogy and Classical and Contemporary Rhetoric at the graduate level, I have invited students to imagine the possibilities for new forms of discourse, new kinds of academic essays. I do because I believe that writing classes (and the whole field of composition studies) must employ richer visions of texts and composing processes. If are to invent a truly pluralistic society, must envision a socially and politically situated view of language and the creation of texts-one that takes into account gender, race, class, sexual preference, and a host of issues that are implied by these and other cultural differences. Our language and our written texts represent our visions of our culture, and need new processes and forms if are to express ways of thinking that have been outside the dominant culture. Finally, I believe that teaching students to write involves teaching them ways to critique not only their material and their potential readers' needs, but also the rhetorical conventions that they are expected to employ within the academy. Work in composition has been expanded enormously by theories of cognitive processes, social construction, and by the uses of computers and other forms of technology, yet, as Adrienne Rich writes, we might hypothetically possess ourselves of every recognized technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary,' but not transformative (Rich 247-48). David Kaufer and Cheryl Geisler argue that freshmen composition and writing across the curriculum have remained silent about newness as a rhetorical standard, as a hallmark of literacy in a post-industrial, professional age. They do not believe that this silence can be justified on either intellectual or pragmatic grounds . (309).

Preview this article: A Symposium on Feminist Experiences in the Composition Classroom, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/43/3/collegecompositionandcommunication8868-1.gif

Let me take as a point of departure from this relative certainty Rose's concluding remark that from our students' can learn much of what we want to know about the ways cultural realities such as gender influence literacy practices-if we learn to read those stories (257). Let us grant that we want to know about these cultural realities, the traces of which our student texts bear, against their writers' intentions. Let us also grant the reason for wanting to know about these realities: the world we respond to is the world that our literacy practices represent to us, so that how we symbolize ourselves in the world with others can significantly affect our living in that world. Rose's conclusion still

Academic Literacies suggests that the narrow focus on academic ways of reading, writing and thinking is limited and limiting for both students and teachers at the college level. Chiseri-Strater uses ethnographic field methods to uncover the multiple literacies that two college students bring to different disciplines and shows how factors such as gender, human development, and private talents are ignored in the college curriculum. She works against Hirsch's restricted view of literacy and offers many suggestions for expanding our notion of what it means to be literate in an academic setting. This book joins the continuing debate over cultural literacy, but unlike Hirsch's and Bloom's works, it offers a new point of view - the students'. Those who plan curricula and set goals for higher education too often ignore these individuals who are the patrons of the system. In addition, composition scholars who are involved in the emerging field of academic discourse communities will find Chiseri-Strater's position of interest. Finally, since the book offers a critique of the dominant mastery mode of teaching in colleges, it should appeal to those woman's studies scholars who are developing a feminist pedagogy that brings women students into the conversation about womens's ways of knowing, perceiving and learning.

This essay is about resistance, mine and my students', and about the angered and impassioned writing that arises when texts challenge the ideologies of readers. It's been two years now since I taught the particular section of freshman English that gives rise to my story and my writing. course was the second semester of Northern Illinois University's two semester freshman sequence, a course that emphasizes documented writing, the sort that baptizes students into academic discourse. My course was thematically organized and designed to sensitize students to some of the larger problems in our culture; in fact, we were looking at institutions of all sorts-education, religion, politics, and so on. I should say that this sort of ideological consciousness-raising is very much part of our faculty's concern; ours is a largely blue-collar student body where white suburban students meet inner-urban ethnic diversity, sometimes for the first time. And so I felt that having a thematic section on The Status of Women was a good and strong part of my syllabus. class had read three essays in this unit, and after minimal discussion and minimal direction, they adjourned to the computer lab to write their readings of one of the essays. I asked them to react in writing for several pedagogical reasons, the first of which is purely pragmatic-I wanted the class to begin to compose at the computer terminal rather than to transfer handwritten text to disk. Second, I wanted them to interact with the text, to cite it, to struggle with it, to read in another way than they may have been accustomed to reading. Third, I wanted their writing to produce reading that would subvert their assumptions about gender roles, that would allow them to sort out what is biological from what is gendered.