Recognizing that many of us teach the medieval English women mystics Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich in survey courses, this essay attempts to put these writers in context for teachers who may have only a passing familiarity with the period. Focusing on passages of their writings found in the Longman and Norton anthologies of British literature, the author shows how these women responded to and shaped sociopolitical issues of their day, particularly questions of heresy and disorder as threats to Catholic institutional stability, the role of Mendicant teachings for the laity of the church, and the rise of the cult of the Eucharist.

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Reviewed are: A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working-Class Bar, by Julie Lindquist Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education, by Catherine Prendergast.

In the critically acclaimed movie 8-Mile, Future, a host for the rap battles held in a Detroit neighborhood, proffers the above encouragement to his charge, an aspiring white rapper, played by recording sensation Eminem. Aside from the connections, real and imagined, between the emergence of Bunny-Rab bit, the character Eminem portrays, and his actual rise in the hip-hop community, the movie evokes a number of interesting quandaries about discursive strategies? voices historically ascribed to and inscribed by African Americans. Facets of Eminem's language appear to resonate with that of African American rappers, not to mention the larger oral tradition from which hip-hop discourse derives, though his existen tial experience surrounding that language cannot. Moreover, rappers speak of neigh borhoods plagued by economic disenfranchisement, disenfranchisement that some whites, like Eminem, have experienced as well. Still, Future's exhortation raises at least two questions: can a language performer (irrespective of genre) of one race truly participate in the discursive community of another? Given the material op pression that has accompanied the socially constructed denigration of African phe notypic features, can the sound of blackness be ultimately divorced from the sight of blackness?1

With the inauguration of Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writ ing and Rhetoric, composition scholars now have access to student writing that is not accompanied by?and therefore not represented as an instantiation of?the peda gogical apparatus that has historically accompanied the publication of student writ ing in composition studies' flagship journals. Students from schools as varied as the University of Missouri-Kansas City, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Oberlin College, and Messiah College publish their work in this new undergraduate rheto ric and writing journal founded by scholars Laurie Grobman and the late Candace Spigelman of Penn State Berks-Lehigh Valley. As is the case with any other work published in a journal, authors' full names, institutional affiliations, and short bios are provided. Each essay that appears in Young Scholars has been reviewed by peers

The author uses a discussion of Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven to argue that cross-racial voicing on the part of white writers may in fact express an attempt to acknowledge and perhaps explore the rhetorical efficacy of a black ethos. At the same time, the author suggests that English studies scholars of all races need to create forums where cross-racial voicing can be explored, that white English professors must continue to interrogate hegemonic attempts to control and colonize African American discourse, and that teachers should design assignments that help students gain insights into the historical and contemporary struggles blacks face to characterize their own discursive practices.

The author argues that the new journal Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric offers access to student writing outside of the pedagogical apparatus that has historically accompanied the publication of such writing, and in the process challenges composition’s standard practice of citing students by first name only. Young Scholars in Writing, as representative of the disciplinary shift from a conception of writing as verb to writing as noun, compels composition studies to consider the affective aspect of citation, which often goes unremarked.

The author argues for rethinking the longstanding division between critical pedagogy and liberation theology in the academy. After examining both the historical reasons that contribute to the split and the implications that result, the author demonstrates how key tenets of the prophetic tradition of liberation theology could enrich the critical classroom.

Reviewed are Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location, by Lisa Ede; Self-Development and College Writing, by Nick Tingle; and The End of Composition Studies, by David W. Smit.

After summarizing typical criticisms of multicultural composition readers, the author draws on work in “New Literacy Studies” to point toward composition pedagogies that encourage multicultural interactions beyond selections in assigned readers The author suggests that what is ultimately needed is a productive critical frame not only for refining critical assessments of multicultural readers, but also for opening composition to “transcultural” understandings.

Taking the 1969–74 classroom “dramedy” Room 222 as a case study, and setting it in the context of a range of portrayals of teachers and teaching from the period, the author raises the questions about the positive portrayals of committed teachers. These portrayals, along with positive views of community involvement and a multicultural environment, might have progressive aspects not allowed for by assumptions that such realist commercial productions inevitably co-opt any urge toward radical critique. She argues that such a rethinking might also offer teachers a way to reconsider and communicate with our students about current popular culture.

Tracing the literature on writing conferences during four tension points in higher-education enrollments--the 1890s, the 1930s, the 1950s, and the 1970s--the author suggests that conferences have been championed primarily at those moments when students were both more numerous and more diverse, an urge countered, however, by faculty working conditions. Looking at the present, then, he argues that the need for conferencing and the pressures that preclude extensive one-to-one work seem an amalgam of these earlier eras and continue to threaten the teaching-learning ideal that conferences represent.

An instructor and her student offer complementary perspectives on what happened in a classroom in which reading Toni Morrison opened up nearly intractable resistances to a making and sharing of knowledge in which no one was allowed to take refuge in what Catherine Fox calls “whiteliness” and assume a position outside of others’ knowing while asking those same others to assume the “burden of representation.” Complicating our notion of progressive pedagogy and our assumption that we know what progress looks like, the article suggests, in Jones’s words, “both education’s gifts and its limitations.

exploded, as more works by writers of color and white women writers have entered it (while very little work by white male writers has exited-the dire predictions of opponents of multiculturalism notwithstanding). In turn, syllabi, anthologies, curricula, and scholarship have changed to include a far more diverse array of writers, texts, voices, and experiences than had been included even ten, let alone thirty or forty years ago. Most universities' student bodies have become much more diverseculturally, ethnically, linguistically, experientially, socioeconomically. Although faculty diversity has not increased nearly as much and while not all teachers and disciplines have been equally influenced by multiculturalism, for the most part, what is taught-to whom and by whom-is very different in 2005 than it was in 1960.1 For some, these changes signal the victory of multiculturalism-although its supposed victory is greeted with sorrow or anger by some, and with gladness by others. For some, multiculturalism has gone too far; for others, multiculturalism has

Surveying the current state of our “plural and dynamic multiculturalisms” and directing attention to valuable resources in anthologies and criticism, the author suggests that multicultural studies might now focus more on resistance and creativity in the face of oppression than on oppression itself; more on the multiple intersections and interactions of different groups, positions, and experiences than on single (sometimes essentialized) groups; and more on existing power relations and social inequities, and the structural nature of racism and oppression, than on individual behavior.

Colleagues and friends remember the late Candace Spigelman.

An instructor and her student offer complementary perspectives on what happened in a classroom in which reading Toni Morrison opened up nearly intractable resistances to a making and sharing of knowledge in which no one was allowed to take refuge in what Catherine Fox calls “whiteliness” and assume a position outside of others’ knowing while asking those same others to assume the “burden of representation.” Complicating our notion of progressive pedagogy and our assumption that we know what progress looks like, the article suggests, in Jones’s words, “both education’s gifts and its limitations.”

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The author describes the issues raised for him by team-teaching a course on the Shoah that aimed to incorporate familial, historical, and rhetorical perspectives. Considering firsthand testimonies, songs written by camp inmates, renderings of others’ stories such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and works of fiction and poetry by writers without firsthand experience of the Shoah, he is ultimately led to wonder whether the stories of those who underwent such experiences stand utterly outside critique and appropriation and may demand of us instead only that we never forget.

Reviewed are The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature, edited by Amit Chaudhuri; Mirrorwork: Fifty Years of Indian Writing, 1947–1997, edited by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West; and Women Writing in India, Vol. 2: The Twentieth Century, edited by K. Lalita and Susie Tharu.

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Reviewed are Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media, edited by Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick; Defining Visual Rhetorics, edited by Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers; The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film, edited by David Blakesley; and Tuned In: Television and the Teaching of Writing, by Bronwyn T. Williams.

I 'm glad we don't know whether Chaucer raped one of my brightest students exclaimed, because if he did, I couldn't like And I want to like him if I'm going to read him. The student was responding to my lesson on Chaucer's biography. Within the scope of my upper-level undergraduate Chaucer course, I include pertinent information about his participation in fourteenth-century English social and political life, and I thought it worthwhile to mention that, according to court documents, Cecily Chaumpaigne in 1380 released Geoffrey Chaucer from omnimodas acciones tam de raptu meo tam [sic] de aliqua alia re velcausa-'actions of whatever kind either concerning my rape or any other matter' (Howard 317). I explained to the class that no certain interpretation of this inscrutable event exists. Because raptus could refer to either a kidnapping or a rape, medievalists can do little more than conjecture about the events that transpired between Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne.' My student seized this ambiguity and therein found sufficient wiggle room in her reaction to Chaucer that she could continue to enjoy his literature without having to commit herself to liking the works of a rapist. For her, the potential ethical ramifications of aligning a personal affection for Chaucer and his literature with her contemporary social and political beliefs were alleviated by a welcome gap in historical knowledge. As happens so frequently in the classroom, we moved beyond this moment, but my student's words stuck with me uncomfortably. What if Chaucer had indeed been a rapist? How would I encourage my students to negotiate the difficult readerly terrain of enjoying great literature written by bad people? Other literature professors face similar uncomfortable moments with, for example, Malory's rape, Spenser's violent diatribes against the Irish, Byron's incest, Yeats's and Pound's Fascist sympa-

The author identifies possibilities of a “lost island” rhetoric that situates English department Web sites--and the profession’s defining practices--in an ambivalent relationship to global capital via the online network. The article describes how three department sites variously employ this rhetoric to assert English studies’ own forms of intellectual productivity and cultural value in dialogue with the market logic that dominates the Web.

The author considers cases of literary figures whose ethics might make readers uncomfortable—Geoffrey Chaucer’s possible rape of a young woman, Flannery O’Connor’s possible racism—and argues that, even though postmodernism has “killed” the author as an object of critical inquiry, careful attention to questions of authorial and readerly ethics can still play an important role in both our students’ development as critical and engaged readers and our own.

Examining a range of visual images of executions, both legal (the executions of convicted murderers) and extralegal (the lynchings of innocent African Americans), in still photographs and in Hollywood films, the authors suggest that while such images may flatten and neutralize the popular debates and politics surrounding the issues, this is not inevitable, and that if we work at sustaining careful attention to its operations the image is neither self-evident nor doomed to obscure the political.