From an unsettled, ambivalent middle between discourses of generative AI integration and refusal, we offer a critical-ethical stance for AI-engaged writing assignments. We apply a critical thinking framework to these assignments, assert critical AI literacy as a kind of critical thinking, and discuss how critical thinking and critical AI literacy can facilitate ethical discernment about generative AI use. This unsettled, critical-ethical stance positions scholars in our field to support context-sensitive pedagogical responses to generative AI across first-year writing, Writing Across the Curriculum, writing centers, and beyond.

In gaming, cheat codes change how players engage a system by inviting exploration and reducing the fear of failure. Drawing on writing center pedagogy, this article proposes a similar framework for navigating generative AI in writing instruction and positions play as a method for developing critical AI literacy. Writing centers have long served as spaces where students engage collaboratively with new technologies and construct meaning through dialogue. This article extends that tradition by positioning writing center pedagogy as a framework for helping students examine AI’s ethical implications through treating it as a rhetorical situation to be unpacked, which demands principled, human-centered engagement rooted in values such as collaborative exploration. By weaving together writing center praxis and game-informed pedagogy, this article contributes to ongoing conversations in writing studies about how to integrate AI in ways that support critical thinking and ethical reflection. It demonstrates how playful, classroom-tested activities can animate discussions of bias and representation while helping students build rhetorical discernment through experience. Ultimately, the article argues that ethical literacy must be practiced through relational, iterative work. As writing classrooms become one of the few remaining spaces where students encounter generative AI with support and critical context, writing instructors have a vital opportunity to help students learn to write with, against, and around powerful technologies.

English as a Second Language (ESL) students’ silent expression in writing is often perceived as “indirect” or “inarticulate” in the views of Western rhetoric and academia. However, the meaning of silence and its rhetorical practice can differ from culture to culture, and this difference forms a cultural ethos that is unique and significant to the writer. In response to Anne Gere’s aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of silence, I explore cultural ethos as another dimension to recognize ESL students’ silent rhetoric and to expand the theoretical and pedagogical landscape of rhetoric and composition.

This essay investigates the relationship between academic writing and the rhetorical awareness that college students gain from evangelical backgrounds. We interviewed thirty-seven students about their experiences with reading, writing, and debate in religious contexts and how those practices informed their work in first-year writing. Interviews revealed that students observed or practiced rhetorical skills that found parallels in writing courses. Some critiqued evangelical rhetoric, at times because of skills they learned in first-year writing. These findings call for pedagogical practices attuned to the knowledge writers bring from evangelical backgrounds.

So often left unquestioned is the very place in and from which scholarly ethos and praxis are being proposed. The goal of this essay is to call for and work towards establishing a foundation to explore such questions vis-à-visdeep rhetoricity.Deep rhetoricityinvites and demands of us all returns, careful reckonings, and enduring tasks. We illustrate possibilities ofdeep rhetoricityacross these three epistemic principles. Ultimately, we argue fordeep rhetoricityboth as an intervention into rhetorical practices and as a praxis of invention.

Integrating design thinking methodology into writing courses can help students to develop creative approaches to problem definition and solution development. Tracing how students work with and through written genres common to design thinking reveals the possibilities and potential of learning new patterns of inquiry and argumentation. Developing these creative habits of mind empowers students to explore and invent solutions to complex, multidimensional problems across the broad range of their disciplinary, professional, and civic lives.

This article offers a genealogy of the deliberative policymaking of the WPA Outcomes Statement 3.0 Revision Task Force. Interviews with Task Force members reveal that the revised statement presents composing, technology, and genre as “boundary objects,” in order to preserve the document’s kairos for as long as possible.

Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s writing textbook, “They Say / I Say,” has triggered important debates among writing professionals. Not included within these debates,however, is the empirical question of whether the textbook’s templates reflect patterns of language use in actual academic discourses. This article uses corpus-based discourse analysis to examine how two particular “moves” discussed in the textbook are realized in three large corpora of professional and student academic writing. The analysis reveals important differences between the textbook’s wordings and those preferred by student and professional writers. It also uncovers differences in use of “interpersonal”functions of language by experienced and less experienced writers. In offering this detailed analysis of academic prose, I aim to extend calls to recenter language in writing research and instruction. I conclude with implications for discussing academic argumentation with students.

This article demonstrates that the terms of the debate over whether college is “worth it” undermine composition’s mainstay arguments for relevance. In light of students’ market-driven motivations, the article posits a citizen-worker perspective in composition that refuses the compartmentalization of economic, cultural, and civic functions of college.

This article analyzes the rhetoric of public attitudes toward composition, as represented in Stanley Fish’s “Think Again” blog in the New York Times and in comments posted by his readers. Fish denounces the field of composition as highly politicized and anti-academic and advocates instead a belletristic, current-traditional approach. The dialogue between Fish and his audience exemplifies the web of definitions and logical fallacies by which current-traditionalism and belletristic English frame public attitudes. To the extent that composition’s “public turn” involves engaging public opinion, compositionists must anticipate this framing or else find their engagements ineffective, even self-defeating.

Dear Colleagues and Friends~~This month's issue includes various genres- articles, symposium contributions, review essay, exchange, and poster page-that tap both time and space. In these collective texts, we have historical perspectives helping us understand our own past and allowing us to update our present; linkages to other fields of endeavor so as to enhance our own; connections across spaces to other sites of writing around the world; and closer looks at our own sites-hence the title of this introduction. As represented here, our field includes a capacious view, and as we expand sites of inquiry and activity, we have a more robust and complex view. In this introduction, then, I'll summarize each of these contributions before taking up two other tasks: (1) outlining the treat in store for us, in the combined September and December special issue of College Composition and Communication, we will learn from colleagues about various and diverse Locations of Writing; and (2) sharing with readers our new policy on rememberingIn our first article, Expanding the Aims of Public Rhetoric and Writing Peda- gogy, Writing Letters to Editors, Brian Gogan takes up how the conventional assignment of the letter to the editor can be located in what he calls an ap- proach to public rhetoric and writing pedagogy that is conducted according to the tripartite aims of publicity, authenticity, and efficacy. Drawing on his work with students, Gogan expands on these single-concept aims to situate them in relationships: publicity-as-condition and publicity-as-action, authenticity- as-location and authenticity-as-legitimation, and efficacy-as-persuasion and efficacy-as-participation. Gogan also argues that we should separate and emphasize the participation the letter-to-the-editor genre entails from the persuasion that may be its aspiration: when the efficacy of the letter-to-the- editor assignment is expanded so that it is understood in terms of participation that may lead to persuasion, public rhetoric and writing pedagogy embraces the fullness of the ecological model [of writing] by seeing the wide range of effects-persuasive or not-there within.Continuing recent work recovering our collective writing pasts, our next article details the experiences of several 19th century women, some of them from the U.S., making their educational way at Cambridge University. In 'A Revelation and a Delight': Nineteenth-Century Cambridge Women, Academic Collaboration, and the Cultural Work of Extracurricular Writing, L. Jill Lam- berton focuses on the writing these women engaged in, especially outside the classroom, in order both to succeed in the classroom and to affect wider spheres of influence. Defining this writing as a form of collaborative peer activity foster- ing agency, Lamberton identifies three benefits accruing to her 19th century subjects: (1) use of extracurricular writing that augmented and enriched cur- ricular learning; (2) use of writing to develop social networks and circulation; and (3) use of such writing to shift public opinion, looking outside the college or university for broader audiences to voice support and agitate for change.Mya Poe, Norbert Elliot, John Aloysius Cogan Jr., and Tito G. Nurudeen Jr. return us to the present as they consider how our writing programs can be enhanced: by adapting a legal heuristic used to determine what in the law is called impact. In The Legal and the Local: Using Disparate Impact Analysis to Understand the Consequences of Writing Assessment, these col- leagues first distinguish between inequities produced by intent from those produced unintentionally-the latter called disparate impact-before outlin- ing a three-part question-driven process that can identify such instances and work toward ways of changing them:Step 1: Do the assessment policies or practices result in adverse impact on students of a particular race as compared with students of other races? …

Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton Inside the College Gates: How Class and Culture Matter in Higher Education Jenny M. Stuber Going North, Thinking West: The Intersections of Social Class, Critical Thinking, and Politicized Writing Instruction Irvin Peckham Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education Mike Rose The Persistence and Complications of Class Sharon Mitchler The Unseen Weight of Class Bradley Dilger When Institutions and Education Reproduce Social Class Inequities: What Else Factors In? Or, The Problem of Stinky Skin Sue Hum For Whom Does It Profit? Lisa Mahle-Grisez

Individual agency is necessary for the possibility of rhetoric, and especially for deliberative rhetoric, which enables the composition of what Latour calls a good common world. Drawing on neurophenomenology, this essay defines individual agency as the process through which organisms create meanings through acting into the world and changing their structure in response to the perceived consequences of their actions. Conceiving of agency in this way enables writers to recognize their rhetorical acts, whether conscious or nonconscious, as acts that make them who they are, that affect others, and that can contribute to the common good. Responsible rhetorical agency entails being open to and responsive to the meanings of concrete others, and thus seeing persuasion as an invitation to listeners as also always agents in persuasion.

Contemporary argument increasingly relies on quantitative information and reasoning, yet our profession neglects to view these means of persuasion as central to rhetorical arts. Such omission ironically serves to privilege quantitative arguments as above “mere rhetoric.” Changes are needed to our textbooks, writing assignments, and instructor development programs to broaden how both we and our students perceive rhetoric.

Discussions of intellectual property are often the focus of rhetoric and composition research, and the question of textual origins grounds these discussions. Through an examination of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia anyone can edit, this essay addresses disciplinary concerns about textual origins and intellectual property through a discussion of situated and constructed ethos.

Our article seeks to integrate alternative voices into traditional rhetorical study by turning to Bitch and BUST, two mainstream zines that serve as dynamic examples of young women’s rhetoric in action. We believe these zines are shaping the present and future of women’s rhetoric. Their most significant contribution to the understanding of women’s rhetoric is located in the way they accommodate ethotic constructions that are at once contradictory and complementary. While these texts can seem abrasive and perhaps even outrageous, the ways in which the writers shape their ethe can teach rhetoricians and teachers of rhetoric and writing about the modes of argumentation practiced by this subculture of the current feminist movement, one which is firmly grounded in the larger public sphere.

Based on an ethnographic study of a writing course taught by a talented instructor who integrated process and critical pedagogy approaches, I argue that many students actively engage with the concerns of critical pedagogy when the classroom ethos strongly supports their agency’ their ownership of their developing ideas and texts.

This article examines the various uses to which Stephen Toulmin has been put in composition studies. It presents data on citations of Toulmin in nine journals, considers appeals to Toulmin in several strains of composition scholarship, and argues that composition scholars ought to attend more carefully to Toulmin’s later works.

Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle’s “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning” First-Year Composition’ as “Introduction to Writing Studies’” in the June 2007 issue of CCC (volume 58.4, 552–84) has raised a good deal of debate, and I welcome more contributions from readers as we discuss the Downs-Wardle article in these pages. Joshua Kutney’s written response came in time for publication in this issue. In addition to the print copies of the journal, the original article is featured on the CCC Online Archive (www.inventio.us/ccc).

This article challenges current assumptions about the teaching and assessment of critical thinking in the composition classroom, particularly the practice of measuring critical thinking through individual written texts. Drawing on a case study of a class that incorporated disability studies discourse, and applying discourse analysis to student work, “Accessing Disability” argues that critical thinking can be taught more effectively through multi-modal methods and a de-emphasis on the linear progress narrative.

This study challenges the prevailing interpretations of the Greek rhetorical principle of kairos “saying the right thing at the right time” and attempts to draw on a more nuanced understanding of the term in order to provide generative re-readings of three Braddock Award–winning essays.

Often, composition teachers present public debate as if it occurs on a rhetorically level playing field, with victory going to the person who argues most logically. Real-world contestants are seldom so equal in power. We can enrich our pedagogy by studying such encounters; example: the 1263 disputation at Barcelona between Rabbi Nachmanides and Friar Paul Christian.

In preparing Suzanne Bordelon’s article for the February issue of CCC, the editorially unthinkable happened: An earlier version of her fine article replaced the final, wellrevised version as it went to the printer. In addition to my profuse apologies to Professor Bordelon, I have decided to publish the correct version of the article, delaying until September my publication of Janet Eldred’s review essay of several books on technology. The silver lining, in this instance, is a teachable moment, a rare glimpse for readers of CCC into an accountable but ultimately human (and I hope humane) editorial process: Bordelon’s article, quite good to begin with, was judged an “accept with revisions,” and she revised the article extensively and well, passing muster with a final read by one of the first reviewers and me.

Personal narrative embeds the expertise of subordinated groups in stories that seldom translate into public debate. The authors describe a community writing project in which welfare recipients used personal narratives to enter into the public record their tacit and frequently discounted knowledge. The research illustrates the difficulties and possibilities “rhetorical, emotional, and material” of constructing narratives that “cross publics.”

The article contends that previous scholars have misread George Pierce Baker’s efforts by focusing primarily on The Principles of Argumentation and the role of logic. Baker’s view of logic was more complex than scholars have claimed. He challenged traditional concepts of formal logic, highlighting only those aspects that would help students learn argument.

I argue that examining two collections of essays designed for the preparation of new writing teachers and published twenty years apart provides some important clues to what has occurred to composition studies in the interval. Building on the framework I established in two previous CCC articles, I argue that composition studies has become a less unified and more contentious discipline early in the twenty-first century than it had appeared to be around 1990. The present article specifically addresses the rise of what I call critical/cultural studies, the quiet expansion of expressive approaches to teaching writing, and the split of rhetorical approaches into three: argumentation, genre analysis, and preparation for “the” academic discourse community.

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We argue against the metaphor of the “level playing field” and its natural coercive power; in so doing, we call for an end to the invisibility that the debate over accommodations has imposed on learning disabilities in the past decade. A literature review of LD in composition shows how this invisibility has manifested itself in our field through limited professional discussion of LD. In response, we propose not a level playing field but a new playing field altogether, a visible one that actively promotes alternative assistance for student writers with LD in first-year composition programs. We seek to show how the LD and composition fields could create a powerful partnership by serving students with LD through the principle of the liberal theory of distributive justice.

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.

The project Andrea Greenbaum attempts in EmancipatoryMovements in Composition is both worthwhile and ambitious. The project is worthwhile because introducing newcomers, particularly graduate students, to the multiple disciplines that have been incorporated into critical pedagogy in the last decade can be daunting, and there is certainly room in the field for text that names and organizes them. The project is ambitious because it attempts to do this in mere one hundred pages, with additional pages devoted to an appended syllabus, notes, and citations. Greenbaum opens her book with personal narrative of the Passover story, drawing from it the lesson that human beings need to experience oppression-even if it is relived only mythically-in order to understand our social responsibility to counter and resist those forces that seek to dominate, repress, and disempower individuals (xi), setting the polemical tone she maintains through the rest of the work. She organizes the book around what she identifies as four key approaches to critical pedagogy for the writing classroom: neosophistic rhetoric, cultural studies, feminist studies, and postcolonial studies, examining each for what they offer writing teachers seeking to enact critical pedagogy in their classrooms. Her first two chapters offer brief historical development of sophistic and cultural studies approaches. Greenbaum begins with the reclamation of sophistic rhetoric, drawing particularly on Susan Jarratt, Thomas Kent, John Poulakos, Sharon Crowley, and handful of others. She proposes that this neosophistic contributes to rhetoric of possibility by drawing attention to the indeterminacy of language, an empowering shift from logos privileged in Western philosophy to mythos that invites disruptive stoof the frontier is reconstrued as collabo ative zone of cultur l and linguistic contact, a historical moment of meeting, clashing, and cooperating ulticultura encounters (66).

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.

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.

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.

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-

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.

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 argue that our responses to the Oakland ebonics resolution miss what made the resolution so significant while also making debate about it so intractable. I propose that compositionists who acknowledge attitudes that made the resolution so significant can productively engage the larger public regarding literacy education in a racially divided democracy.

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 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.

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Negative argumentation about methodological approaches threatens to limit the field of composition: it exacerbates the tension concerning the place and value of empirical studies in research; it potentially limits the field’s ability to ask certain kinds of research questions; and it risks impoverishing the methodological education offered to new practitioners in the field.

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.

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.

Introduction Multicultural Education: Definitions, Development, Variants, and Controversies Multiculturalism: Egalitarian Social Reconstruction through Educational Reform Multiculturalism: An Assessment of Variations, Basic Arguments, and Concepts The Multicultural Agenda and Critical Thinking Compared Bibliography Index

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Marjorie Roemer, Lucille M. Schultz, Russel K. Durst, Reframing the Great Debate on First-Year Writing, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 50, No. 3, A Usable Past: CCC at 50: Part 1 (Feb., 1999), pp. 377-392

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

New Historicism and Cultural Materialism have become two of the most powerful and appealing movements in modern criticism. Their conquest of Renaissance studies has escalated into global colonialisation of English and American literary history. A wealth of innovative work has emerged on everything from the Canterbury Tales to the Cantos, bringing intense theoretical controversy in its wake. This reader pulls the diversity and polemical vigour of this new critical constellation into focus for the first time. The introduction identifies the distinctive concerns of both approaches, unpacks their theoretical assumptions and clarifies their chief points of convergence and antagonism. It offers a sympathetic but sceptical perspective on Cultural Materialism and New Historicism, highlighting their blindspots as well as applauding their insights, and searching out the points where they seem poised to move beyond the limits of their own methodologies. The selection itself unfolds in three stages. The first group of essays locates the intellectual sources of both movements in figures such as Foucault, Geertz, Althusser, Williams and Derrida. The second mounts a theoretical debate between prominent exponents and opponents of both kinds of criticism, including Stephen Greenblatt, Catherine Belsey, Alan Sinfield and Majorie Levinson. The final group carries the debate forward through a wide range of critical readings, which illustrate the practical impact of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, on the novels, plays and poems of authors from Aeschylus to Ezra Pound. The Reader concludes with a bibliography of criticism which has applied these approaches to medieval literature, Shakespeare and the Renaissance, 18th century studies, the Romantic period, 19th century literature, early 20th century writing and the American literary tradition.