The authors define midrash and explain its importance as a Jewish rhetorical practice, focusing on how two particular examples of midrash deal with the deity’s response to the destruction of the Temple.

The blogs of various Orthodox Jewish women show that the digital realm enables them to blend the public and the private. That is, it allows them to participate in Jewish life without breaking the laws of modesty that otherwise prevent them from such public engagement.

The guest editor introduces the issue’s essays by reviewing previous scholarship on Jewish rhetorical studies. She points out that the question of how to define a distinctly “Jewish” rhetoric is hard to resolve. Ultimately, she argues, an author’s or text’s relation to Jewish traditions should be pragmatically determined, through analysis of specific historical or geographical contexts.

The author explores the topic of Jewish rhetorics by examining how particular Jewish thinkers have conceptualized the ethical relation between self and other. She draws particular attention to the tacit rhetorical methodology at work in the teachings of Rabbi Yéhouda Léon Askénazi. She shows that he distinguished himself from the more well-known philosopher Emmanuel Levinas by calling for reciprocity between human beings, including within the relationship between giver and receiver.

In Madison, Wisconsin, a series of debates occurred about the possible establishment of a sister-city relationship with Rafah, a city in Gaza. The tension and miscommunication within these debates point to the value of taking what the author terms an exilic rhetorical position, a stand that would not be tied to claims of firm identity or territoriality.

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Focusing on writing placement at a particular university, the authors analyze the limits of SAT tests as a tool in this process. They then describe the writing program’s adoption of a supplementary measure: a faculty committee’s review of essays by students who may need to be reassigned to a different writing course.

Given the multiple meanings of rhetoric and composition, as well as the vexed history of institutional relationships between these two terms, it is important for scholars to trace how they are “worked”—that is, how they materially function—in a variety of specific circumstances.

Writing program administrators and other composition specialists need to know the history of writing assessment in order to create a rich and responsible culture of it today. In its first fifty years, the field of writing assessment followed educational measurement in general by focusing on issues of reliability, whereas in its next fifty years, it turned its attention to validity. Overall, the field has exhibited a tension between reliability and validity, with the latter increasingly being conceptualized as involving a whole set of considerations that need to be theorized.

Emphasizing the value to English majors of a course in translation studies, the authors describe one involving them at their home institution.

Reviewed are Composition and Cornel West: Notes toward a Deep Democracy by Keith Gilyard and The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl.

The author responds to the essays in this special issue by noting that they emphasize the importance of careful, complex comparisons between Western and Chinese rhetorical traditions.

The history of American imperialism, as well as China’s strong presence on the contemporary global scene, should encourage American scholars of rhetoric to look beyond the nation-state and study other rhetorical traditions such as Chinese practices of argument. A debate during the Western Han dynasty over the country’s economic policies illustrates how official-orators discursively engaged one another while representing various philosophical orientations. This debate also reminds us of how important the values of humanity, empathy, and responsibility should be in contemporary rhetorical education.

Identifying the specific complexities and historical context of post-Mao Chinese literary women’s rhetoric, along with ways they have been misread, the author argues in general that Western feminist critics need to be cautious about applying their concepts to non-Western women’s literature.

Examining two particular texts and applying modifications of Western feminist concepts, the author argues that early twentieth-century Chinese women’s writing contains feminist thoughts and textual strategies far more complex and nuanced than conventional wisdom has led us to expect.

The author calls for scholars of rhetoric and composition to become familiar with the cosmology, language, educational attitudes, speech genres, and intellectual debates of a specific culture other than their own. For a case study, she turns to Chinese history and focuses on exchanges between three models of rhetoric: Confucian, Daoist, and Legalist.

The guest editor introduces this special issue on Chinese rhetoric by emphasizing that we should (1) focus on how the Chinese engaged their domestic and foreign Other; (2) be prepared to acknowledge and validate voices that call for or search for other paradigms; and (3) resist the temptation to codify any definitions of rhetoric even as we seek non-Western alternatives.

Historians of composition and rhetoric need to question the grand narratives that so far have predominated in their field, including those that turn particular figures like Fred Newton Scott into lone heroes.

Both critics and defenders of Judith Butler’s theoretical writing have failed to acknowledge that she employs classic argumentative moves.

Reviewed are Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University by William Clark; Buying into English: Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World by Catherine Prendergast; How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation by Marc Bousquet; and Inside the Teaching Machine: Rhetoric and the Globalization of the U.S. Public Research University by Catherine Chaput.

Studying Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Criseyde helps us evaluate current theories of trauma, especially the very different accounts of it provided by Ruth Leys and Cathy Caruth. The poem renders trauma a feature of both linguistic acts and personal pain. Besides citing it in suffering individuals, Chaucer’s text points to a complicated and ambivalent circulation of such wounds both in culture and for it.

The author discusses graduate courses he has taught that help students turn their academic prose into publically accessible opinion writing.

Reviewed are Making Writing Matter: Composition in the Engaged University by Ann Feldman; City of Rhetoric: Revitalizing the Public Sphere in Metropolitan America by David Fleming; and Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World by Nancy Welch.

Acknowledging that 2009 is the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, several scholars argue that Abraham Lincoln has played or can play an important role in the college English curriculum.

When composition students look to their teachers for vocational guidance, both groups should acknowledge that the contexts of such terms as career, mobility, and skills have radically changed. In particular, the economy now links the global with the local, and capitalism has shifted from the fordist model, dominant through much of the twentieth century, to a newer, “fast” model.

Challenging the thesis of Stanley Fish’s recent book Save the World on Your Own Time, the author argues that political awareness was vital to the development of a productive basic writing pedagogy, and that composition teachers can responsibly work from their own political values in the classroom.

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In the post-Civil War United States, several historically black colleges gave a central role to classical rhetoric in their curricula, and many of their students used its concepts to develop a distinctly black, oppositional public sphere.

The fiftieth anniversary of the Strunk and White edition of The Elements of Style is an appropriate occasion for considering its enormous popularity. Especially interesting is the esteem for the book held by Theodore Kaczynszki, convicted as the Unabomber. His embrace of Strunk and White’s values points to a kind of violence and primitivist nostalgia in their ideology of style

In reporting their research, historians of rhetoric and composition should be more explicit and specific about their investigative methods.

Reviewed is Teaching with Life Writing Texts, edited by Miriam Fuchs and Craig Howes.

In her influential 1988 essay, “Fighting Words,” Jane Tompkins argued that the arguments typically made by literary critics are characterized by an aggressive competitiveness that amounts to violence. But, as Tompkins’s own rhetorical strategies demonstrate, at least as deplorable are the practices whereby critics render certain people anonymous.

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The authors describe their individual and collective experiences reconstructing their New Orleans-based university composition program in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. They emphasize how the concept of floating foundations helps account for changes in their students’ interests, and they suggest that this idea is applicable to the work of writing instructors in general.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, various Mexican women journalists pioneered a mestiza rhetoric that was resistant to oppressive ideologies.

The border rhetorics that Latino/a students bring into the classroom can help them and other students resist being appropriated by academic discourse. For example, the corrido involves a mimicry of conventions that enables students to envision a fluid identity rather than exchange one identity for another.

The author recounts his efforts to find out about Puerto Rican activist Pedro Albizu Campos, who was imprisoned chiefly because of his rhetoric.

Drawing on the work of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, the author examines how—in order to explain their positions in the academy—many students of color (including those who are both first-generation Chicano/a and first-generation college students) unfortunately rely on dominant color-blind ideology concerning freedom of choice and equal opportunity.

Contemporary Chicano codex rhetorics subversively question the alleged superiority of Western writing traditions, while reminding us that Mesoamerican pictographs have been an important—although repressed—part of rhetorical history.