College Composition and Communication
596 articlesSeptember 2003
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Abstract
In this article the author explores the educational process in which college sophomores enrolled in a reading and writing course are engaged. She defines this education as translation: a process of preservation, re-vision, and re-rendering of both texts and selves, prompted by particular course assignments, readings, and forums for interaction.
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Abstract
While some students need more writing instruction than others, The Politics of Remediation reveals how that need also pertains to the institutions themselves. Mary Soliday argues that universities may need remedial English to alleviate their own crises in admissions standards, enrollment, mission, and curriculum, and English departments may use remedial programs to mediate their crises in enrollment, electives, and relationships to the liberal arts and professional schools. Following a brief history of remedial English and the political uses of remediation at CCNY before, during, and after the open admissions policy, Soliday questions the ways in which students' need for remedial writing instruction has become widely associated with the need to acculturate minorities to the university. In disentangling identity politics from remediation, she challenges a powerful assumption of post-structuralist work: that a politics of language use is equivalent to the politics of access to institutions.
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Rhetoric on the Edge of Cunning; Or, The Performance of Neutrality (Re)Considered As a Composition Pedagogy for Student Resistance ↗
Abstract
In today’s classroom and larger cultural climate, overtly politicized “critical” composition pedagogies may only exacerbate student resistance to issues and identities of difference, especially if the teacher is marked or read as different her/himself. I therefore suggest that the marginalized teacher-subject look to contemporary theoretical notions of the “radical resignification” of power as well as to the neglected rhetorical concept of mêtis, or “cunning,” to engage difference more efficaciously, if more sneakily. Specifically, I argue that one possible praxis for better negotiating student resistance is the performance of the very neutrality that students expect of teachers.
June 2003
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Abstract
In this article I use the lens of postcolonial theory to reflect on my uses of a varied series of writing pedagogies in cross-cultural classrooms at an international college. Such reflection helps reveal how relations of power between teacher and students and underlying ideological assumptions about knowledge and discourse often resulted in hybrid responses of mimicry, frustration, incomprehension, and resistance. A pedagogy constructed against the backdrop of postcolonial theory might provide both students and their teacher in such a cross-cultural setting with a more complex and useful way of understanding issues of power, discourse, identity, and the role of writing.
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Abstract
Nan Johnson demonstrates that after the Civil War, nonacademic or parlor traditions of rhetorical performance helped to sustain the icon of the white middle class as queen of her domestic sphere by promoting a code of rhetorical behavior for women that required the performance of conventional femininity. Through a lucid examination of the boundaries of that gendered rhetorical space - and the debate about who should occupy that space - Johnson explores the codes governing and challenging the American woman's proper rhetorical sphere in the postbellum years. While men were learning to preach, practice law, and set political policies, women were reading elocution manuals, letter-writing handbooks, and other conduct literature. These texts reinforced the conservative message that women's words mattered, but mattered mostly in the home. Postbellum pedagogical materials were designed to educate Americans in rhetorical skills, but they also persistently directed the American to the domestic sphere as her proper rhetorical space. Even though these materials appeared to urge white middle-class women to become effective speakers and writers, convention dictated that a woman's place was at the hearthside where her rhetorical talents were to be used in counseling and instructing as a mother and wife. Aided by twenty-one illustrations, Johnson has meticulously compiled materials from historical texts no longer readily available to the general public and, in so doing, has illuminated this intersection of rhetoric and feminism in the nineteenth century. The rhetorical pedagogies designed for a postbellum popular audience represent the cultural sites where a rethinking of women's roles becomes open controversy about how to value their words. Johnson argues this era of uneasiness about shifting gender roles and the icon of the quiet woman must be considered as evidence of the need for a more complete revaluing of women's space in historical discourse.
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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.
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Abstract
This article echoes Robert J. Connors’s call for a reexamination of sentence pedagogies in composition teaching and offers an explanation of the unsolved mystery of why sentence combining improves student writing, using insights provided by work in contemporary research in linguistics and in language processing. Based the same insights, I argue that we invite words and phrases, the true members of sentences, to important positions in writing classes and describe practical methods for doing so.
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Abstract
Introduction Part I: Premises and Foundations 1. Illiteracy at Oxford and Harvard: Reflections on the Inability to Write 2. A Map of Writing in Terms of Audience and Response The Uses of Binary Thinking Part II: The Generative Dimension 4. Freewriting and the Problem of Wheat and Tares 5. Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience 6. Toward a Phenomenology of Freewriting Part III: Speech, Writing, and Voice Part III: Speech, Writing, and Voice 7. The Shifting Relationships Between Speech and Writing 8. Voice in Literature 9. Silence: A Collage 10. What Is Voice in Writing? Part IV: Discourses 11. Reflections on Academic Discourse: How It Relates to Freshmen and Colleagues 12. In Defense of Private Writing 13. The War Between Reading and Writing - and How to End It 14. Your Cheatin' Art: A Collage Part V: Teaching 15. Inviting the Mother Tongue: Beyond Mistakes, Bad English, and Wrong Language 16. High Stakes and Low Stakes in Assigning and Responding to Writing 17. Breathing Life into the Text 18. Using the Collage for Collaborative Writing 19. Getting Along Without Grades - and Getting Along With Them Too 20. Starting the Portfolio Experiment at SUNY Stony Brook Pat Belanoff, co-author 21. Writing an Assessment in the Twenty-First Century: A Utopian View
February 2003
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Abstract
Reflecting the rich complexity of contemporary college composition pedagogy, this unique collection presents twelve original essays on several of the most important approaches to the teaching of writing. Each essay is written by an experienced teacher/scholar and describes one of the major pedagogies employed today: process, expressive, rhetorical, collaborative, feminist, critical, cultural studies, community service, and basic writing. Writing centers, writing across the curriculum, and technology and the teaching of writing are also discussed. The essays are composed of personal statements on pedagogical applications and bibliographical guides that aid students and new teachers in further study and research. Contributors include Christopher Burnham, William A. Covino, Ann George, Diana George, Eric H. Hobson, Rebecca Moore Howard, Susan C. Jarratt, Laura Julier, Susan McLeod, Charles Moran, Deborah Mutnick, Lad Tobin, and John Trimbur. An invaluable tool for graduate students and new teachers, A Guide to Composition Pedagogies provides an exceptional introduction to composition studies and the extensive range of pedagogical approaches used today.
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Abstract
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.
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Abstract
I begin with an analogy: teaching research-based argumentation and critique in composition studies is like learning how to perform hip-hop music. My analogy's focus on argumentation does not exclude traditional methods of argumentative pedagogy based on models like Stephen Toulmin's complex hierarchies or the Aristotelian triad of deliberative (offering advice), forensic (taking a side in a debate, often a legal or controversial matter), and epideictic (a speech of praise or blame appealing to an already won-over audience) discourse. Instead, I pose the analogy as a first step towards developing alternative or additional ways to engage composition students with the argumentative essay. In choosing hip-hop as a model for the composition essay, I attempt to draw upon a dominant form of contemporary culture familiar to the majority of students I encounter in my classrooms. Does a relationship between hip-hop and com-
December 2002
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Abstract
How can we prepare the workforce of tomorrow to meet the increasing writing demand placed upon them in the Information Age? In this text, Anne Beaufort provides a multidimensional response to this critical question. Through analyzing the knowledge domains writers draw upon in specific writing situations, Beaufort illuminates the conditions that contribute to the ongoing development of writing skills. Using findings gathered in a longitudinal study of four women, Beaufort renders an ethnographical account of how writers are socialized into ways of communicating according to the conventions of their workplace. Beaufort offers a view of the developmental process entailed in attaining writing fluency in school and beyond, and the conditions that contribute to acquiring such expertise. Her book illuminates what it takes to foster the flexibility and versatility writers must possess in the workplace of the 21st century.
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Abstract
Foregrounding issues of race, ethnicity, and education, this article ties together two important issues in teaching (so-called) basic writing: how social and pedagogical issues in higher education shape possibilities for bicultural students’ writings and how these students can use their developing sense of literacy and their texts to explore identity.
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Abstract
Using a variety of common forms from first-year composition, this paper examines the purposes of CCCC, transformative experiences at professional conferences, and the elements of my literacy autobiography. I then argue for recognition of the knowledge-building role of writing programs in two-year colleges and for a “write to work” principle, calling for full pay for all who teach required writing courses. Originally, this manuscript was a speech integrated with a PowerPoint® presentation using more than 100 slides (text, photographs, and music), which cannot be fully represented here.
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Abstract
Foregrounding issues of race, ethnicity, and education, this article ties together two important issues in teaching (so-called) basic writing: how social and pedagogical issues in higher education shape possibilities for bicultural students' writings and how these students can use their developing sense of literacy and their texts to explore
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Abstract
2001 CCCC Outstanding Book AwardThe vast majority of academic books are written from the scholar s position, even those that primarily concern teaching. Writing/Teaching, on the other hand, is a book about teaching written from the position of the teacher. As the title suggests, Kameen s book is split into two halves yet both, in different ways and through different discourses, are derived from his work in the classroom, and his own struggle with issues and problems all teachers of writing must face.The first half is a series of essays originating from a graduate seminar Kameen team-taught with professor and poet Toi Derricotte in 1994. Included are essays Kameen wrote, a selection of pieces written by other members of the group, and a reflective postscript. These essays combine personal narrative, reflective meditation, and critical inquiry all used as discourse to depict and examine the process of teaching.The second half of the book contains essays on Plato s dialogues primarily Phaedrus and Protagoras as a means to interrogate the position of teacher through the lens of the most famous of Western pedagogues Socrates. Here, Socrates is used as a tool to examine and critique both Kameen s own teacherly identity and, in a wider sense, the set of cultural forces that pre-figure the available positions for both teacher and student in contemporary education.What unites both halves is the way Kameen approaches each the personal and the scholarly from his position as teacher. The texts presented provide the occasion for a complex and nuanced meditation on the classroom as a legitimate arena for the production of knowledge and research. Sure to be timely and controversial, Writing/Teaching will enter into the debate on whether to reconfigure the relationship between research and teaching currently taking place among teachers of composition, cultural studies, and rhetoric. Compelling reading for teachers or those contemplating a career in the profession.
September 2002
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Abstract
The role of the professor in community service writing courses factors into the teaching, research, and overall institutional viability of these initiatives, yet too little has been written about the role of the professor in service learning. Through an analysis of recent publications on service learning and data gathered during an outreach initiative at University of California, Berkeley, this article reveals a few of the obstacles that hinder the sustainability of community literacy programs. I find that professors in service learning courses can better sustain these initiatives when they view the community site as a place where their research, teaching, and service contribute to a community’s self-defined needs and students’ learning.
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Abstract
In this study of the history of rhetoric education, Susan Kates focuses on the writing and speaking instruction developed at three academic institutions founded to serve three groups of students most often excluded from traditional institutions of higher education in late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century America: white middle-class women, African Americans, and members of the working class. Kates provides a detailed look at the work of those students and teachers ostracized from rhetorical study at traditional colleges and universities. She explores the pedagogies of educators Mary Augusta Jordan of Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts; Hallie Quinn Brown of Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio; and Josephine Colby, Helen Norton, and Louise Budenz of Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York. These teachers sought to enact forms of writing and speaking instruction incorporating social and political concerns in the very essence of their pedagogies. They designed rhetoric courses characterized by three important pedagogical features: a profound respect for and awareness of the relationship between language and identity and a desire to integrate this awareness into the curriculum; politicized writing and speaking assignments designed to help students interrogate their marginalized standing within the larger culture in terms of their gender, race, or social class; and an emphasis on service and social responsibility.
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Abstract
Plagiarism is difficult, if not impossible, to define. In this paper, I argue for a context sensitive understanding of plagiarism by analyzing a set of written institutional policies and suggesting ways that they might be revised. In closing, I offer examples of classroom practices to help teach a concept of plagiarism as situated in context.
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Abstract
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.
June 2002
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Abstract
In this article, we identify in the formation of U.S. college composition courses a tacit policy of English monolingualism based on a chain of reifications of languages and social identity. We show this policy continuing in assumptions underlying arguments for and against English Only legislation and basic writers. And we call for an internationalist perspective on written English in relation to other languages and the dynamics of globalization.
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This article examines the contradictory representations of whiteness in the literature on critical pedagogy and argues that a deeper engagement with these contradictions can help critical educators in their work with white students. The essay explores a number of sites-the rhetoric of critical pedagogy, the literature on whiteness that has surfaced in the past five years-and concludes by analyzing portraits of white students as they read texts that challenge them to think about race and racial identity in new ways.
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Abstract
This article examines the contradictory representations of whiteness in the literature on critical pedagogy and argues that a deeper engagement with these contradictions can help critical educators in their work with white students. The essay explores a number of sites--the rhetoric of critical pedagogy, the literature on whiteness that has surfaced in the past five years--and concludes by analyzing portraits of white students as they read texts that challenge them to think about race and racial identity in new ways.
February 2002
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Abstract
Listening Up will change the way you view radical literacy education, offering a personal look at the Freirean ideas that guided Rachel Martin's early years of teaching, and the theories and classroom experiences that urged her to take a second look. Through her own compelling example, Martin demonstrates the power of a sustained dialogue between critical theory and classroom and community practice. The ideas Martin draws on help us think in new ways about how power works. They provide the possibility of seeing how teachers' own needs, fears, and desires might find a place in classroom inquiry as we come to see how our relationship to domination is a matter neither of complete acquiescence nor absolute resistance. While the goals of meaning-making and becoming colearners have become guideposts in radical teaching, Martin aims in a different direction. She advocates for a pedagogy that places teachers in a more genuine position of colearner as together with students, they question the meanings they make. Later chapters highlight the practical implications that notions of multiple voices and identities have for the teaching of writing and the questions they raise about the teaching of reading. Martin also describes community publishing projects. Poor and working-class people are too seldom able to have their written visions and strategies distributed, to become part of the way the world is described and possibilities for change are widely considered. Martin argues that community publishing does that, as it also links self-definition to self-determination.
December 2001
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A Rediscovered Tradition: European Pedagogy and Composition in Nineteenth-Century Midwestern Normal Schools ↗
Abstract
This study examines composition at public Midwestern normal schools, the teacher training institutions of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It argues that the unique social environment, educational aims, and intellectual traditions of the normal school gave rise to attitudes about composition theory, methods, teachers, and students that are much more compatible with composition’s contemporary ethic than those associated with the elite Eastern colleges where the origins of composition have most often been studied.
June 2001
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Abstract
In the literature of critical pedagogy, resistance theory analyzes, ranks, and judges the emancipatory value of writing behaviors, privileging nonreproductive and transformative consciousness over cultural reproduction. The ranking of consciousness and the central metaphor of “reproduction” too often are naïvely applied, suppressing the political, social, and pedagogical value of writing that develops from within contradictory consciousness.
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Occasioned by the recent epidemic of violence in schools and the author’s memory of violent schoolyard rhymes, this essay explores the ways students experience contemporary writing pedagogy. To do so, the essay ranges from rhetoric’s historical discussion of the pleasures of writing to composition’s more recent interest in academic professionalism to Gilles Deleuze’s theory of masochism to the problem of teaching and learning in a consumer culture.
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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.
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Drawing on classroom experiences, the author suggests that philosopher Donald Davidson's interpretive principle of charity can help explain why communication is impoverished or even impossible in classrooms governed by traditional, authoritarian practices that form a “pedagogy of severity.” If the classroom is to be a place of dialogue, learning, and mutual transformation, teachers should promote a “pedagogy of charity,” which assumes that students are rational beings with mostly true and coherent beliefs.
February 2001
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Abstract
The five authors call for increased awareness of disability in composition studies and argue that such an awareness can productively disrupt notions of “writing” and “composing” at the same time it challenges “normal”/“not normal” binaries in the field. In six sections: Brueggemann introduces and examines the paradox of disability’s “in-visibility” White considers the social construction of learning disabilities; Dunn analyzes the rhetoric of backlash against learning disabilities; Heifferon illustrates how a disability text challenged her students; Cheu describes how a disability-centered writing class made disability visible; all five conclude with challenges and directions for composition studies in intersecting with disability studies.
December 2000
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Abstract
Mapping the Terrain of Feminist Cyberscapes, Kristine Blair and Pamela Takayoshi Map of Location I: The Body in Virtual Space Technological Fronts: Lesbian Lives On the Joanne Addison and Susan Hilligoss Postmodernist Looks at the Body Electric: Email, Female and Hijra, Sarah Sloane Re-Membering Mama: The Female Body Embodied and Disembodied Communication, Barbara Monroe Making the Map: Interview with Helen Schwartz Map of Location II: Constructions of Online Identities Our Studnets, Our Selves I, A Mestiza, Continually Walk Out of One Culture Into Another: Alba's Story, Sibylle Gruber Pedagogy, Emotion and The Protocol of Care, Shannon Wilson. Writing (Without) The Body: Gender and Power in Networked Discussion Groups, Donna LeCourt Making the Map: Interview with Gail Hawisher Map of Location III: Discourse Communities Online and in Classrooms A Virtual Locker Room in Classroom Chat Spaces: The Politics of Men as Other, Christine Boese The Use of Electronic Communication in Facilitating Feminine Modes of Discourse: An Irigaraian Heuristic, Morgan Gresham and Cecilia Hartley Over the Line, Online, Gender Lines: Email and Women in the Classroom, Dene Grigar Maps of Location IV: Virtual Coalitions and Collaborations Designing Feminist Multimedia for The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, Mary Hocks Voicing The Landscape: A Discourse of Their Own, Laura Julier, Paula Gillespie, And Kathleen Blake Yancey Thirteen Ways of Looking at an M-Word, Margaret Daisley and Susan Romano Making The Map: Interview With Mary Lay and Elizabeth Tebeaux Map of Location V: The Future: to be Mapped Later Feminist Research in Computers and Composition, Lisa Gerrard An Online Dialogue with the Contributors to Feminist Cyberscapes Mapping the Future: Interview with Cynthia Selfe
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Abstract
Writing instructors often identify clichés as the weakest spots in student writing, but looking at students’ uses of cliché in context can teach us about their struggles to fashion new knowledge from what they already believe to be true. Most importantly, writing instructors who examine their responses to cliché (or any other “undesirable” aspect of student writing) can learn about the ways in which their pedagogical practices can deafen them to what students are trying to say.
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Abstract
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.
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This article examines issues of literacy and identity relative to the development of a critical pedagogy and a critical democracy. An earlier version was delivered as the Chair’s Address at the Fifty-first Annual CCCC Convention on April 13, 2000.
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Abstract
Writing instructors often identify clich6s as the weakest spots in student writing, but looking at students' uses of clich6 in context can teach us about their struggles to fashion new knowledge from what they already believe to be true. Most importantly, writing instructors who examine their responses to clich6 (or any other undesirable aspect of student writing) can learn about the ways in which their pedagogical practices can deafen them to what students are trying to say.
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Abstract
The authors attempt to confront the construction of “whiteness” as a silent but potent epistemology that pervades writing instruction and contributes to racism within academic institutions. Pedagogical practices as well as university policies are discussed, focusing particularly on the subject positions of “black” and “white” for both students and instructors.
September 2000
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Abstract
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.
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Abstract
The teacher-student conference is standard in the repertoire of teachers at all levels. Because it's a one-to-one encounter, teachers work hard to make it comfortable; but because it's a pedagogical moment, they hope that learning occurs in the encounter, too. The literature in this area often suggests that a conference is a conversation, but this doesn't account for a teacher's need to use it pedagogically. Laurel Johnson Black's new book explores the conflicting meanings and relations embedded in conferencing and offers a new theoretical understanding of the conference along with practical approaches to conferencing more effectively with students.
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Abstract
This article examines the sentence-based pedagogies that arose in composition during the 1960s and 1970s—the generative rhetoric of Francis Christensen, imitation exercises, and sentence-combining—and attempts to discern why these three pedagogies have been so completely elided within contemporary composition studies. The usefulness of these sentence-based rhetorics was never disproved, but a growing wave of anti-formalism, anti-behaviorism, and anti-empiricism within English-based composition studies after 1980 doomed them to a marginality under which they still exist today. The result of this erasure of sentence pedagogies is a culture of writing instruction that has very little to do with or to say about the sentence outside of a purely grammatical discourse.
June 2000
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Abstract
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.
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Abstract
When a composition teacher incorporated community-based writing assignments into her course, she found that the curriculum did not support students’ transitions to nonacademic settings. Her success in transforming the curriculum suggests that the writing classroom can function not only as a site for “general writing skills in-struction” but also for analysis of rhetorical variation.
February 2000
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Abstract
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.
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Abstract
After years of colonization, oppression, and resistance, American Indians are making clear what they want from the heretofore compromised technology of writing. Rhetorical sovereignty, a people’s control of its meaning, is found in sites legal, aesthetic, and pedagogical, and composition studies can both contribute to and learn from this work.
December 1999
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Abstract
The two volumes under review make strange companions in many ways, but they share a concern for this perennial student who thinks of “course simply as credit.” They both deplore the mercenary and the expedient in higher education, particularly in writing instruction. They both are for learning, foremost and last. But their remedies to the credit syndrome are quite different, even antithetical. In part this is because their frames of reference are so different, the one never looking beyond course itself, the other holding to a longer view. This difference in frame of reference deserves some thought.
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Abstract
I want to suggest that an examination of rhetorical practices at the local bar is instructive for two reasons: (1) the barroom is predictably different from the university writing classroom; and (2) the barroom is surprisingly similar to the university writing classroom. A look at how neighborhood bars are qualitatively different from classrooms can teach us about our working-class students’ rhetorical motives, and a recognition of how they are functionally similar can teach us something about our own.
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Abstract
American literary life has been enriched over the past generation by habits of criticism practiced at Amherst College during the tenure of William H. Pritchard. These essays, which were commissioned as a tribute to Pritchard, celebrate his fortieth year at Amherst and demonstrate the breadth of his influence in the fields of theory, criticism, and pedagogy. The occasion of forty years of teaching at Amherst by William H. Pritchard, the renowned critic of Frost, Jarrell, and many others, has generated a remarkable collection of essays by former students, colleagues, and friends. The essays themselves are a spectrum of contemporary criticism, ranging from classroom memoirs to analytic essay in criticism to assessment of the state of academic letters today. These contributions, a tribute, by reason of their very range, are a salute to the breadth of William Pritchard's circle of literary acquaintance. Under Criticism demonstrates the fine persistence in certain manners of approach and habits of focus that go, among that circle, under the name of criticism. Drawing foremost on their engagement with the literature before them, Christopher Ricks, Helen Vendler, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Neil Hertz, David Ferry, Paul Alpers, Joseph Epstein, and Frank Lentricchia-as well as fifteen other critics and men and women of letters-reinforce Professor Pritchard's prescription that in order to have a hearing, the critic needs to keep listening.