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Reviewed is Save the World on Your Own Time by Stanley Fish.

President Bush’s National Security Language Initiative focuses narrowly on gearing language education to security and military needs. English educators should work with their counterparts in foreign language departments to promote a broader view, one that encourages study of the multiple language groups that currently exist within the United States.

Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead can be a useful text in an undergraduate English class, helping students think through issues of individualism. Rand’s own concept of the self, however, ignores its social dimensions.

The author reports on and analyzes the inclusion of parody in her sequence of assignments for a graduate composition theory seminar. She contends that having students write parodies of particular theorists and theoretical camps enables them to gain critical leverage that they might not otherwise obtain on a field (in this case, composition studies).

The author discusses his experience in a university project that led to the creation of a first-year writing text based on interviews with members of a local neighborhood. In particular, he analyzes the negative reaction that many of the community’s residents expressed toward the text’s portrayals of them. From the tensions that developed, the author concludes that English studies must go beyond mere expansion of the canon and reflect upon the very nature of value, including the importance of “use-value” with respect to the production and circulation of community-generated texts.

When scholars write about their research into writing programs’ archives,they often face the ethical question of whether to name the administrators who were involved in documents. The author identifies and provides examples of three basic orientations to this issue, which he calls overt-historical, covert-qualitative, and hybrid-institutional. Referring to his own research experience, he ultimately endorses the third approach.

The author explains how principles of cognitive science can help teachers of literature use texts as a means of increasing students’ commitment to social justice. Applying these principles to a particular work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he calls particular attention to the relationship between cognitive science and literary schemes for building reader empathy.

Because hybrid first-year college writing programs are an emerging phenomenon, it is important for composition specialists to identify their potential strengths and possible disadvantages. The author reviews the various forms that such programs have taken so far, and she engages in an extended critique of one particular institution’s model, questioning especially its claims to objectivity.

Wayne Booth’s model of reader response as “friendship” would seem to be severely tested by the writings of Hunter Thompson, because this author often portrayed himself as someone who was anything but ingratiating. Yet we can indeed apply Booth’s theory to Thompson’s texts, especially if we distinguish their protagonist from what Booth referred to as “the implied author.”

Reading for creative writers must be viewed as a critical practice, one informed and complicated by context, history, and theory, in part so that they can actively participate in the intellectual community of English studies.

As a field, creative writing must reject its traditional image of “uselessness” and realize its anticapitalist, antiprivatizing potential as a creator of public space. In part, this move would involve teaching students to question traditional notions of influence, as well as the modernist concept of the author as a lone,autonomous individual.

Reconsideration of the late Wendy Bishop’s work should involve taking seriously her proposal that composition studies turn to the self-reports of writers, including creative writers.

English departments must work harder to include creative and critical courses, in part through experiments with pairing them.

Defining Our Terms - Elizabeth Hodges: Reviewed are Keywords in Creative Writing, by Wendy Bishop and David Starkey, and Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom: The Authority Project, edited by Anna Leahy. The “Sticking” Problem: Locating Creative Writing at Home and Abroad - Sarah E. Harris: Reviewed are Creative Writing Studies: Practice, Research, and Pedagogy, edited by Graeme Harper and Jeri Kroll; Teaching Poetry Writing: A Five-Canon Approach, by Tom C. Hunley; and The Author Is Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Reconceived by Michelene Wandor. Creative Writing for Everyone - Megan Fulwiler: Reviewed is The Practice of Creative Writing: A Guide for Students by Heather Sellers.

Creative writing programs should transform into creative writing studies, a field of scholarly inquiry and research that would have three main strands: pedagogical, historical, and advocacy-oriented. This move would help bridge the gap between literary studies and composition.

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The current interest in multimodal rhetoric was anticipated by Jacob Riis’s social documentary texts and presentations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In contrast with the socialist urban critiques presented by Friedrich Engels, Riis’s work demonstrated profound ambivalence toward the city’s poor. While calling for reform of their living conditions, Riis subjected them to surveillance and depicted them as potential revolutionaries whom the upper classes should fear.

Reviewed are “Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property” by Susan M. Bielstein and “Rhetorics of Display”, edited by Lawrence J. Prelli.

The 1966 Dartmouth conference has long been regarded as a landmark in the history of American college composition. Meriting new attention, however, is the role it played in affirming the notion of “the native speaker,” a concept important to the postwar Anglo-American language alliance behind the meeting.

Originally published in a 1984 issue of College English, Stephen North’s article “The Idea of a Writing Center” has over the years been much cited in writing center scholarship. Even so, this scholarship as a whole did not proceed to gain much presence in CE and other broadly-oriented composition journals. Reconsidering North’s piece, the authors argue for greater attention now to writing centers as sites for potentially valuable scholarly inquiry.

Reviewed are "Archives of Instruction: Nineteenth-Century Rhetorics, Readers, and Composition Books in the United States" by Jean Ferguson Carr, Stephen L. Carr, and Lucille M. Schultz; "The Knowledge Contract: Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace" by David B. Downing; and "Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres" by Hugh Blair, edited by Linda Ferreira-Buckley and Michael S. Halloran.

Reviewed are "Composition and/or Literature: The End(s) of Education", edited by Linda S. Bergmann and Edith M. Baker, and "Integrating Literature and Writing Instruction: First-Year English, Humanities Core Courses, Seminars", edited by Judith H. Anderson and Christine R. Farris.

Author Sue Monk Kidd, who is white, employs stereotypes of African Americans and problematically appropriates features of black writing in her novel “The Secret Life of Bees”. Nevertheless, this book is worth teaching, not only because it has acquired much cultural capital but also because it offers students a way to examine relationships between whites and blacks in American literature and culture.

The author calls for incorporating into English classes what he calls museum-based pedagogy, arguing that it enables the teaching of multiple literacies: verbal, visual, technological, social, and critical. In part, this pedagogy consists of classroom instruction that enables students to understand the persuasive nature of museum displays—the ways in which digital technology mediates, powerful interests influence, social agents negotiate, and multimodal texts communicate meaning.

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Study of the weekly Methodist newspaper "Christian Advocate", from its inception in 1826 to 1832, reveals that Methodist women came to assume important, public, and rarely acknowledged rhetorical roles. More precisely, women moved beyond the confines of the newspaper’s “Ladies’ Department,” the back-page space to which “women’s concerns” were initially consigned.

Teaching postcolonial literature to American college students involves taking them through a dialectical process of thinking about identification. In the first stage, students are encouraged to note similarities between their own lives and those of the work’s characters. With the second step, students examine how the work’s cultural and historical context makes the characters different from them in key ways. Finally, students use the differences that they have found in order to reflect on aspects of their own situations from a new angle. The author demonstrates this process through a discussion of her experiences teaching Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1988 novel Nervous Conditions.

The authors discuss a survey of reading practices that they administered to students at their home institution, the University of Arkansas, as well as logs that students at the school kept of their daily reading acts. An important finding was that, contrary to possible belief, students at this university are reading quite a bit, although they are not spending much time on materials assigned in their courses. The authors propose some methods for boosting students’ interest in academic texts, and they call for other institutions to conduct similar studies.

The author examines surveys indicating that, in general, community college students are significantly less inclined and less able than students at four-year colleges to earn a bachelor’s degree. He argues that it is important for teachers of English to understand the numerous conditions that limit the first group’s chances for such “success.”

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Reviewed is Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life by Anthony T. Kronman.

Traditionally, we English faculty have warned our students against simply identifying with a literary work’s characters. For us, such attachments constitute “reading badly.” But we engage in identifications, too, including ones with the work’s author. A consideration of critical responses to “Benito Cereno” and Uncle Tom’s Cabin enables us to see how our own identifications often operate. In our teaching of reading, we should openly acknowledge our own commitments and help our students negotiate them.

This special issue on feminist rhetorics and transnationalism challenges the disciplinary defining of rhetoric and composition around U.S.-centric narratives of nation, nationalism, and citizenship. Such defining has tended to focus on feminist and women’s rhetorics only within the borders of the United States or Western Europe. The result is, potentially, the reproduction of institutional hierarchies. Transnationality refers to movements of people, goods, and ideas across national borders and, like the term borderland, it is often used to highlight forms of cultural hybridity and intertextuality. To bring a transnational focus to our field will require new methodologies and critical comparativist perspectives, which in turn may shift our objects and areas of study.

This essay examines Azar Nafisi’s bestselling memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), in the context of U.S. book club culture. It argues that the memoir appeals to U.S. audiences by mobilizing a neoliberal rhetoric and a pedagogy of empathy that positions the United States as the geopolitical center of feminist empowerment and human rights.

Through analyzing specific examples, the author identifies recurring themes of the genre known as the food memoir, calling attention in particular to its value as multicultural literature

Abstract Reviewed is Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms by Inderpal Grewal.

The authors report their experiences teaching courses on food and food literature, arguing that these subjects have yet to be sufficiently appreciated as genuinely intellectual.

Despite the important work emerging from both the global and digital turns in rhetoric and composition studies, one key area has yet to be examined: the central role that the circulation of digital texts plays in the transformation and appropriation of feminist discourse. This article proposes a new methodology for analyzing the processes through which the modes of global circulation of digital representations become rhetorical and, ultimately, political actions. Feminist rhetorical studies must extend its analyses to examine how the modes of digital circulation matter in the mediation of relations among groups, communities, and nations because this digital circulation often constructs and reinforces binary oppositions and rhetorics of superiority.

The author examines the history and rhetoric of the Slow Food movement, relating it in particular to protests against globalization.