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.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism and his irenic view of the cultural other inform this article that builds the multiple voice of the eloquent “I” as a dialectic self-construction where codes of meaning are inscribed. The eloquent “I” cultivates a deepened self-dialogue and offers students an epistemological and rhetorical discipline, bearing witness to their imaginative, meaningful interiority and their written, public articulation of it.

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.

Radical feminist textuality of the 1960s and today provides a suggestive example of networked and collectively literate action, action dependent on the constant and visible contextualization of self and writing within the discourses that shape us. In this essay, I argue that an articulation of radical feminist textuality can benefit both scholarship and classroom, in that it situates writers as rhetorical agents who can write, resist, and, finally act within a network of discourses and identifications.

Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism and his irenic view of the cultural other inform this article that builds the multiple voice of the eloquent I as a dialectic self-construction where codes of meaning are inscribed. The eloquent I cultivates a deepened self-dialogue and offers students an epistemological and rhetorical discipline, bearing witness to their imaginative, meaningful interiority and their written, public articulation of it.

The fiftieth anniversary issue of CCC included a call from Geneva Smitherman for compositionists to renew the fight for language rights. In this article, we take up Smitherman’s call by situating the theory of language rights in composition studies in a brief history of rights rhetoric in the United States.

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.

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.

This article examines Black student responses to Black Panther Party documents and how those documents moved the students toward change. I maintain that by allowing the classroom to function as a public space in which students can discuss the issues that matter to them, teachers can help to foster and encourage student activism and ultimately their empowerment.

This chair’s address to the 52nd Annual Convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, March 2001, draws on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins to explore and celebrate a life in composition. Acknowledging institutional fatigue, I outline possibilities for individual renewal, particularly through the process of mentoring new members. Ending with a convention poem, I invite readers to compose their own.

In early Methodism John Wesley created an extracurricular site of literacy and rhetoric that empowered women and the working classes to read, write, and speak in public. Wesley’s “method” of literacy in community not only transformed religious life in Britain but also redefined the intersections of education, class, and gender.

early Methodism John Wesley created an extracurricular site of literacy and rhetoric that empowered women and the working classes to read, write, and speak in public. Wesley's method of literacy in community not only transformed religious life in Britain but also redefined the intersections of education, class, and gender. an article based on her 1993 CCCC Chair's address, Anne Ruggles Gere critiqued the field of composition: In concentrating upon establishing our position within the academy, we have neglected to recount the history of composition in other contexts; we have neglected composition's extracurriculum (79). Influenced by Shirley Brice Heath's study of community literacy practices, Glenda Hull's work on workplace literacy, Patricia Bizzell's concept of multiple discourse communities, and others, Gere examined the cultural work and literacy practices of writing groups outside the academy, focusing particularly on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American clubwomen, both white and African American. Gere urged us not only to expand our field's history to

To the extent that rhetoric and writing studies bases its theories and pedagogies on the self-present composing subject-the figure of the writer who exists apart from the writing context, from the world, from others-it is anti-communitarian. Communication can take place only among beings who are given over to the outside, exposed, open to the other's effraction. This essay therefore calls for the elaboration of a communitarian literacy that understands reading and writing as functions of this originary sociality, as expositions not of who one is (identity) but of the fact that we are (community).

we read Michael Murphy's article, Faculty for a New University, we were surprised and troubled by the story about adjuncts that Murphy purports to tell. Murphy's argument, that a substructure in rhetoric and composition exists but remains invisible and that to recognize such a substructure would cost universities little, is based on a notion of universities that has not existed in most places for a very long time, if ever. Murphy's idea of a teaching track that supports full-time faculty research is based on a conception of a university at a handful of research institutions. Schools that train graduate students, produce the bulk of scholarship in the field of rhetoric and composition, and grant PhDs are about 7 percent of the total number of universities in this country (Phelan 76). To make an argument about adjunct work and adjunct labor without considering the other 93 percent of us seems to us to be thoughtless, at best, and unethical, at worst. The other aspect of adjuncting that Murphy leaves out is, of course, gender. As Theresa Enos writes, When a field has been feminized and when a disproportionate number of its workers are female, that field is devalued and is subject to both disciplinary and gender bias (43). As the latest report on Women in the Profession indicates, women are still more likely than white men ... to obtain jobs in lower-paying institutions .., and they tend to linger

To the extent that rhetoric and writing studies bases its theories and pedagogies on the self-present composing subject—the figure of the writer who exists apart from the writing context, from the “world,” from others—it is anti-communitarian. Communication can take place only among beings who are given over to the “outside,” exposed, open to the other’s effraction. This essay therefore calls for the elaboration of a “communitarian” literacy that understands reading and writing as functions of this originary sociality, as expositions not of who one is (identity) but of the fact that “we” are (community).

Errors seem to bother nonacademic readers as well as teachers. But what does it mean to be “bothered” by errors? Questions such as this help transform the study of error from mere textual issues to larger rhetorical matters of constructing meaning. Although this study of fourteen business people indicates a range of reactions to errors, the findings also reveal patterns of qualitative agreement—certain ways in which these readers constructed a negative ethos of the writer.

The Conduit Metaphor has been roundly condemned by language scholars, including scholars in rhetoric and composition, but it is time to reevaluate its import and value. Rather than simply asserting a mistaken view of linguistic communication, the Conduit Metaphor combines with the metaphor Language Is Power to form a prudentially applied ethical measure of discourses, genres, and texts.

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.

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.

The Dissertation Consortium, Challenging Tradition: A Conversation about Reimagining the Dissertation in Rhetoric and Composition, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Feb., 2001), pp. 441-454

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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.

Traces of a offers a unique scholarly perspective that merges interests in rhetorical and literacy studies, United States social and political theory, and African American women writers. Focusing on elite nineteenth-century African American women who formed a new class of women well positioned to use language with consequence, Royster uses interdisciplinary perspectives (literature, history, feminist studies, African American studies, psychology, art, sociology, economics) to present a well-textured rhetorical analysis of the literate practices of these women. With a shift in educational opportunity after the Civil War, African American women gained access to higher education and received formal training in rhetoric and writing. By the end of the nineteenth-century, significant numbers of African American women operated actively in many public arenas.In her study, Royster acknowledges the persistence of disempowering forces in the lives of African American women and their equal perseverance against these forces. Amid these conditions, Royster views the acquisition of literacy as a dynamic moment for African American women, not only in terms of their use of written language to satisfy their general needs for agency and authority, but also to fulfill socio-political purposes as well.Traces of a Stream is a showcase for nineteenth-century African American women, and particularly elite women, as a group of writers who are currently underrepresented in rhetorical scholarship. Royster has formulated both an analytical theory and an ideological perspective that are useful in gaining a more generative understanding of literate practices as a whole and the practices of African American women in particular. Royster tells a tale of rhetorical prowess, calling for alternative ways of seeing, reading, and rendering scholarship as she seeks to establish a more suitable place for the contributions and achievements of African American women writers.

The condition of our public discussions about literary and cultural works has much to say about the condition of our democracy and the author argues for more public discourse--in classrooms, newspapers, magazines, etc. to reclaim a public voice on national artistic matters. In this revealing study of the links among literature, rhetoric, and democracy, Rosa A. Eberly explores the public debate generated by amateur and professional readers about four controversial literary works: two that were censored in the United States and two that created conflict because they were not censored. In Citizen Critics Eberly compares the outrage sparked by the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer with the relative quiescence that greeted the much more violent and sexually explicit content of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psychoand Andrea Dworkin's Mercy. Through a close reading of letters to the editor, reviews, media coverage, and court cases, Eberly shows how literary critics and legal experts defused censorship debates by shifting the focus from content to aesthetics and from social values to publicity. By asserting their authority to pass judgments--thus denying the authority of citizen critics--these professionals effectively removed the discussion from literary public spheres. A passionate advocate for treating reading as a public and rhetorical enterprise rather than solely as a private one, Eberly suggests the potential impact a work of literature may have on the social polity if it is brought into public forums for debate rather than removed to the exclusive rooms of literary criticism. Eberly urges educators to use their classrooms as protopublic spaces in which students can learn to make the transition from private reader to public citizen.

The tradition of rhetoric established 2,500 years ago emphasizes the imperative of speech as a defining characteristic of reason. But in her new book Lend Me Your Ear, Brenda Jo Brueggemann exposes this tradition s effect of disallowing deaf people human identity because of their natural silence. Brueggemann s assault upon this long-standing rhetorical conceit is both erudite and personal; she writes both as a scholar and as a hard-of-hearing woman. In this broadly based study, she presents a profound analysis and understanding of this rhetorical tradition s descendent disciplines (e.g., audiology, speech/language pathology) that continue to limit deaf people. Next to this even-handed scholarship, she juxtaposes a volatile emotional counterpoint achieved through interviews with Deaf individuals who have faced rhetorically constructed restrictions, and interludes of her own poetry and memoirs. The energized structure of Lend Me Your Ear galvanizes new thought on the rhetoric surrounding Deaf people by posing basic questions from a rhetorical context: How is deafness constructed as a disability, pathology, or culture through the institutions of literacy education and science/technology, and how do these constructions fit with those of deaf people themselves? The rhetoric of deafness as pathology is associated with the conventional medical and scientific establishments, and literacy education fosters deafness as disability, both dependent upon the premise that speech drives communication. This kinetic study demands consideration of deafness in terms of the rhetoric of Deaf culture, American Sign Language (ASL), and the political activism of Deaf people. Brueggemann argues strenuously and successfully for a reevaluation of the speech model of rhetoric in light of the singular qualities of ASL poetry, a genre that adds the dimension of space and is not disembodied. Ironically, without a word being spoken or printed, ASL poetry returns to the fading, prized oral tradition of poets such as Homer. The speech imperative in traditional rhetoric also fails to present rhetorical forms for listening, or a rhetoric of silence. These and other break-out concepts introduced in Lend Me Your Ear that will stimulate scholars and students of rhetoric, language, and Deaf studies to return to this intriguing work again and again.

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Challenging the common assumption that the rise of an instructorate unsupported to do traditional forms of research will necessarily result in an exploited academic labor force, inferior teaching, and the final triumph of anti-intellectualism and bureaucracy in academia, this article explores the ways in which the “teaching substructure” existing now in composition and rhetoric has already begun to contribute substantially to the intellectual vitality and institutional standing of the discipline.

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.

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.

For many generations, writing teachers were able to turn their faces from the deep contradiction of our profession. They could teach writing, an activity whose success depends above all on the relationship between the created text and its rhetorical context, within the single and peculiar context of the classroom. They could have their students read textbooks with a few paragraphs about audience awareness and perhaps a few about defining a purpose while assigning essay after essay written for the same audience (the teacher) and the same purpose (to complete a requirement, to earn a grade). They could assign such tasks to every first-year college student in happy innocence as long as they shared the assumption upon which the universal college composition requirement is predicated: When students write school essays, they develop a set of generalizable skills-in organizing ideas, building paragraphs, controlling syntax,

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.

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.

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.

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.

I make the following moves in this article: (1) I briefly trace how rhetorical listening emerged in my thinking; (2) I explore disciplinary and cultural biases that subordinate listening to reading and writing and speaking; (3) I speculate why listening is needed; (4) I offer an extended definition of rhetorical listening as a trope for interpretive invention; (5) I demonstrate how it may be employed as a code of cross-cultural conduct; and (6) I listen to a student’s listening.

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.

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.

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.

Most traditional works of rhetorical history have excluded the activities of women, but Listening to Their Voices retrieves the voices of women who contributed to the rhetorical realm. The nineteen essays in the collection extend existing definitions of rhetoric and enrich conventional knowledge of rhetorical history. In her introduction Molly Meijer Wertheimer traces the patriarchal nature of traditional rhetorical histories as well as the continuing debate about how best to write women into rhetoric's historical record. The volume's essays advance rhetorical theory by examining exceptional women rhetoricians and their unusual rhetorical practices and strategies. Covering a diverse range of rhetorical pursuits and historical eras, the selections look closely at such fascinating topics as the bold speech of ancient Egyptian women, the rhetorical genres of mother's manuals and women's commercial writings in the Middle Ages, the sexual stereotyping of prose style in rhetorical theory of the Enlightenment, and exhortations for racial uplift by nineteenth-century African American women.

Current Rhetorical and Critical theory for the most part separates writing from consciousness and presumes relative truth to be the only possible expressive goal for rhetoric. These presumptions are reflected in our tradition of persuasive rhetoric, which values writing that successfully argues one person's belief at the expense of another's. In this book, Barbara Couture presents a case for a phenomenological rhetoric, one that values and respects consciousness and selfhood and that restores to rhetoric the possibility of seeking an all-embracing truth through pacific and cooperative interaction.

To understand the history of English, Ross Winterowd insists, one must understand how literary studies, composition-rhetoric studies, influential textbooks interrelate. Stressing the interrelationship among these three forces, Winterowd presents a history of English studies in the university since the Enlightenment.Winterowd s history is unique in three ways. First, it tells the whole story of English studies: it does not separate the history of literary studies from that of composition-rhetoric studies, nor can it if it is going to be an authentic history. Second, it traces the massive influence on English studies exerted by textbooks such as Adventures in Literature, Understanding Poetry, English in Action, and the Harbrace College Handbook. Finally, Winterowd himself is very much a part of the story, a partisan with more than forty years of service to the discipline, not simply a disinterested scholar searching for the truth.After demonstrating that literary studies literary scholars are products of Romantic epistemology values, Winterowd further invites controversy by reinterpreting the Romantic legacy inherited by English departments. His reinterpretation of major literary figures theory, too, invites discussion, possibly argument. And by directly contradicting current histories of composition-rhetoric that allow for no points of contact with literature, Winterowd intensifies the argument by explaining the development of composition-rhetoric from the standpoint of literature literary theory.

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).

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