Preview this article: Review: Where Writing Begins: A Postmodern Reconstruction, by Michael Carter, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/56/2/collegecompositionandcommunication4049-1.gif

Using historical and contemporary documents, including student texts, this article examines why and how both novice and experienced writing teachers, including the author, continue to struggle with tacit allegiances to traditional forms while trying to facilitate dialectical writing in their classrooms.

What we ask students to do is who we ask them to be. With this as a defining proposition, I make three claims: (1) print portfolios offer fundamentally different intellectual and affective opportunities than electronic portfolios do; (2) looking at some student portfolios in both media begins to tell us something about what intellectual work is possible within a portfolio; and (3) assuming that each portfolio is itself a composition, we need to consider which kind of portfolio-as-composition we want to invite from students, and why.

Although the Bartholomae/Elbow debate is often framed as a modern conflict between the advocates of “academic” and “personal” writing, it is more appropriately viewed as the most recent manifestation of the historical clash between expressivism and constructivism. However, both sides of this conflict, which split over whether to see writing as a product of the mind or of an external discourse, rest upon a dualist assumption that the primary task of language is to provide linguistic representations of a transcendental ego. This essay first draws from the work of Richard Rorty and John Dewey in order to critique the dualist legacy of the expressivist/constructivist debate and then explicates Dewey’s views on mind, language, and experience in order to reconstruct a pragmatic philosophy of communication and a progressive composition pedagogy.

This article examines the rhetorical practice of liberation theology and how it has altered social relations of power in Latin America. Using the confrontational rhetoric of liberation theology as an example, we develop a rhetorical model that grounds postmodern theories of rhetorical performance in material relations to explain how marginalized or subaltern groups can effect social change.

This essay illustrates key features of visual rhetoric as they operate in two professional academic hypertexts and student work designed for the World Wide Web. By looking at features like audience stance, transparency, and hybridity, writing teachers can teach visual rhetoric as a transformative process of design. Critiquing and producing writing in digital environments offers a welcome return to rhetorical principles and an important pedagogy of writing as design.

Brenton D. Faber's spirited account of an academic consultant's journey through banks, ghost towns, cemeteries, schools, and political campaigns explores the tenuous relationships between cultural narratives and organizational change. Blending Faber's firsthand experiences in the study and implementation of change with theoretical discussions of identity, agency, structure, and resistance within contexts of change, this innovative book is among the first such communications studies to profile a scholar who is also a full participant in the projects. Drawing on theories of Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, and Pierre Bourdieu, Faber notes that change takes place in the realm of narrative, in the stories people tell. Faber argues that an organization's identity is created through internal stories. When the organization's internal stories are consistent with its external stories, the organization's identity is consistent and productive. When internal stories contradict the external stories, however, the organization's identity becomes discordant. Change is the process of realigning an organization's discordant narratives. Faber discusses the case studies of a change management plan he wrote for a city-owned cemetery, a cultural change project he created for a downtown trade school, and a political campaign he assisted that focused on creating social change. He also includes detailed reflections on practical ways academics can become more involved in their communities as agents of progressive social change.

This essay proposes an alternative invention strategy for research–based argumentative writing. By investigating the coincidental usage of the term “whatever” in hip–hop, theory, and composition studies, the essay proposes a whatever-pedagogy identified as “hip–hop pedagogy,” a writing practice that models itself after digital sampling’s rhetorical strategy of juxtaposition.

In an attempt to bring composition studies into a more thoroughgoing discussion of the place of visual literacy in the writing classroom, I argue that throughout the history of writing instruction in this country the terms of debate typical in discussions of visual literacy and the teaching of writing have limited the kinds of assignments we might imagine for composition.

I analyze the public and professional discourse of learning disability, arguing that medical models of literacy misdirect teaching by narrowing its focus to remediation. This insight about teaching is not new; resurgent demands for behaviorist pedagogies make understanding their continuing appeal important to composition studies.

Globalization, or “fast” capitalism, has changed the workplace and writing in it dramatically. Composition epistemologies and practices, elaborated during the twentieth century in tandem with Taylorized workplace literacy requirements, fail to embrace the complexities of writerly sensibilities necessary to students entering the new workforce. To update these epistemologies and practices, MA students in professional writing were positioned as autoethnographers of workplace cultures, reporting to classmates on organizational structures and practices as they affected discursive products and processes. Their studies produced a database of petits recits on workplace cultures, and their work is analyzed for the ways in which it forecasts subjective work identities of writers in the years ahead. Implications are drawn for composition administration, curriculum design, course design, and collaborative work among academics and writers in private and public spheres.

Analyzing postmodern theory, course discussion, and student texts, this article argues that womanist theology and the texts it gathers can serve as efficacious course content for other-literate students. Womanist theology offers students a scholarly discipline that expresses inter- and intracultural rhetorical awareness, bridging the gap between home and school literacy functions.

Composition has neglected the circulation of writing by figuring classroom life as a middle-class family drama. Cultural studies approaches to teaching writing have sought, with mixed success, to transcend this domestic space. I draw on Marx’s Grundrisse for a conceptual model of how circulation materializes contradictory social relations and how the contradictions between exchange value and use value might be taken up in writing classrooms to expand public forums and popular participation in civic life.

We offer institutional critique as an activist methodology for changing institutions. Since institutions are rhetorical entities, rhetoric can be deployed to change them. In its effort to counter oppressive institutional structures, the field of rhetoric and com-position has focused its attention chiefly on the composition classroom, on the de-partment of English, and on disciplinary forms of critique. Our focus shifts the scene of action and argument to professional writing and to public discourse, using spatial methods adapted from postmodern geography and critical theory.

Alternative forms of research writing that displace those of modernism are unfolded, ending with “multi-writing,” which incorporates multiple genres, disciplines, cultures, and media to syncretically gather post/modern forms. Such alternatives represent a shift in academic values toward a more exploratory inquiry that honors mystery.

Susan Wells’ Sweet Reason: Rhetoric and the Discourses of Modernity is an often brilliant but at times frustrating book. It undertakes a project that has been suspended by those who want to re-validate rhetoric (and rhetoricians) within hermeneutics, especially by following the laborious normalizing work involved in Richard Rorty’s anti-foundational relocation of “truth” in the play of interpretative methods. Wells would herself suspend the competitive and entirely disciplinary contest between Aristotelian classical rhetoric (on her account, modernized by Brian Vickers and Jasper Neel, for instance) and hermeneutic rhetoricians who prefer reading the Phaedrus.

Preview this article: Review Essay: Ethics as Barometer: The Impact of Post-modernism and Critical Theory on Composition, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/51/1/collegecompositioncommunication1364-1.gif

History is about storytelling. And like any good narrative invested in recounting tales of forebearers, its aim is not only to create an image of the past but a way of understanding what we see… It allows us to place ourselves as participants in an historical tradition, parts of which we wish to claim and others which we would prefer to distance ourselves from. (Welsch 116).

My purpose here is to [use] concepts from postmodern geography to explore how spaces and places are socially produced through discourse and how these constructed spaces can then deny their connections to material reality or mask material conditions. (Reynolds 13-14).

I began this essay by setting forth a problem that too often, I believe, accompanies a cultural studies approach to writing instruction-namely, the perception among students that cultural critique is a privileged, elitist mode of inquiry, one that is largely indifferent to, if not contemptuous of, those it presumably seeks to enlighten or liberate. I then argued that a dialogic, specifically Bakhtinian approach to response could help us address this problem, and offered a discussion of how two Bakhtinian concepts-anacrisis and the superaddressee-might be applied to our writing classrooms. Underlying what I have attempted here is my belief that cultural critique needs dialogue to restrain its tendencies for authoritarian pronouncements, for "last word" truisms and disabling certainties… . (Farmer 204).

SITUATING DOCUMENT DESIGN. What is Document Design? Evolution of the Field: Contextual Dynamics. OBSERVING READERS IN ACTION. How Documents Engage Readers' Thinking and Feeling. The Impact of Poor Design: Thinking about Ourselves as Users of Texts and Technology. Seeing the Text: The Role of Typography and Space. The Interplay of Words and Pictures. RESPONDING TO READERS' NEEDS. What Document Designers Can Learn from Readers. Appendices. Bibliography. Indexes. Colophon.

Preview this article: Rescuing Postmodernism, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/48/4/collegecompositionandcommunication3166-1.gif

Power, Genre, and Technology Deborah H. Holdstein This Is Not an Essay Carolyn R. Miller Notes on Postmodern Double Agency and the Arts of Lurking James J. Sosnoski

Power, Genre, and Technology Deborah H. Holdstein This Is Not an Essay Carolyn R. Miller Notes on Postmodern Double Agency and the Arts of Lurking James J. Sosnoski

Preview this article: Revising a Writer's Identity: Reading and "Re-modeling" in a Composition Class, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/47/1/collegecompositionandcommunication8710-1.gif

I always thought it was unfair to compare people you've just met to people you've known before. But as I was sitting in class today, I realized I was doing that with you. My first semester here I got into a [composition] class that was marvelous. Jim and the style he used helped take down the bricks that had formed my writing blocks. It was like seeing and feeling and breathing for the very first time. It was exciting. Today, I thought, This woman will have to be pretty good to be as good as he was. Then I mentally slapped myself.

A collection of articles forming a handbook of information on Metropolitan Universities, their unique mission and characteristics. It addresses the questions and concerns of faculty, students, administrators, state educational policy makers, and mayors or city managers, all of whom are involved in institutions located in or near the urban center of a metropolitan area. Johnson and Bell collected articles forming a handbook of information on metropolitan universities and their unique mission and characteristics. It addresses the questions and concerns of faculty, students, administrators, state educational policy makers, and mayors or city managers, all of whom are involved in institutions located in or near the urban center of a metropolitan area.

conversations and further meditations helped her change her working habits so that she was able to write daily, to use a different voice in her writing, to include personal information for an academic audience, and to finish her project in time to submit it for publication. The article was accepted. It's perhaps a particularly capitalist perspective to think of meditation as a means to an end. In Buddhism the practice of meditation is all, and meditators are cautioned against becoming attached to outcomes or insights. Yet in a discipline which talks of process but where teachers often must still evaluate products, and in universities where students want class activities to feed directly into the papers they write, it's difficult to avoid arguing for the practical benefits of offering meditation-at the very least, to students with writing block. Just as Elbow argues for the inclusion of personal writing in the curriculum because, as he puts it, Life is long and college is short (Reflections 136), I urge meditating writing teachers to combine meditation with writing to provide an anodyne for the wounds of schooling and to offer a model for healthy living.

Introductory Remarks Ann E. Berthoff Composing (as) Power Beth Daniell Writing to Heal: Using Meditation in the Writing Process JoAnn Campbell Women’s Ways of Writing, or, Images, Self-Images, and Graven Images C. Jan Swearingen Responses James Moffett

Preview this article: Modeling Theory and Composing Process Models, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/44/1/collegecompositioncommunication8844-1.gif

(Inter)views: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on Rhetoric and Literacy, Gary A. Olson and Irene Gale Douglas Vipond Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age, Patricia Harkin and John Schilb Stephen M. North Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured, Susan C. Jarratt James D. Williams Portfolios: Process and Product, Pat Belanoff and Marcia Dickson Edward M. White Assigning, Responding, Evaluating: A Writing Teacher’s Guide, Edward M. White Karen L. Greenberg Evolving Perspectives on Computers and Composition Studies: Questionsfor the 1990s, Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe Mary G. French Pain and Possibility: Writing Your Way through Personal Crisis, Gabriele Rico JoAnn Campbell

Teachers of writing regularly face the task of advising students about their work-in-progress. The task is problematic because it raises many practical and theoretical issues. Not least is the ethical issue of rights and responsibilities with respect to texts. Researchers recommend that a teacher must somehow make it possible for students to take control of their own writing. A responsible teacher, then, would be a responsive reader, one who helps students identify and solve writing problems but, in the course of suggesting how they might do so, avoids unwittingly appropriating the draft. Responsible students would, in turn, be their own best readers, taking responsibility for solving writing problems of their own making. Therefore, among the many important questions faced by teachers and raised by researchers is how to make comments that respect the differences between a teacher's and a student's responsibility to an emerging text.

Richards on Rhetoric, Ann E. Berthoff W. Ross Winterowd Balancing Acts: Essays on the Teaching of Writing in Honor of William F. Irmscher , Virginia A. Chappell, Mary Louise Buley-Meissner, and Chris Anderson Sam Watson A Sense of Audience in Written Communication, Gesa Kirsch and Duane H. Roen Chris M. Anson Beyond Communication: Reading Comprehension and Criticism, Deanne Bogdan and Stanley B. Straw Sandra Stotsky The Writing Center: New Directions, Ray Wallace and Jeanne Simpson Muriel Harris Writer’s Craft, Teacher’s Art: Teaching What We Know, Mimi Schwartz Wendy Bishop Teaching Advanced Composition: Why and How, Katherine H. Adams and John L. Adams Richard Jenseth Textbooks in Focus: Creative Writing: Creative Writing in America: Theory and Pedagogy, Joseph M. Moxley Released into Language,Wendy Bishop Writing Poems, Robert Wallace What If?: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers, Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter The College Handbook of Creative Writing, Robert DeMaria Chuck Guilford Textbooks in Focus: Technical WritingTechnical Writing: A Reader-Centered Approach, Paul V. Anderson Designing Technical Reports: Writing for Audiencesin Organizations, J. C. Mathes and Dwight W. StevensonTechnical Writing and Professional Communication, Leslie A. Olsen and Thomas N. Huckin Technical Writing: A Practical Approach, William S. Pfeiffer Technical Writing: Principles,Strategies, and Readings, Diana C.Reep Design of Business Communications: The Process and the Product, Elizabeth Tebeaux Carolyn R. Miller