The author argues that constructions of literacy that suppress or omit nonverbal elements such as the visual and the tactile are limiting students’ potential. She traces the way the historical relationship between image and word has consistently privileged language, and offers instances from her experience with students and with her own children to argue for a more reciprocal dynamic and a polymorphic literacy that can increase the scope and power of our literacy and our literacy teaching.

The author suggests that attending to the publishing history of Larsen’s novel and the resulting indeterminacy of its ending(s) offers a concrete example of a materially oriented pedagogy that can illuminate the racial politics behind textual production and its relation to particular historical and cultural moments. He suggests that such a pedagogy offers both another way of understanding the textual contingency emphasized in contemporary theory and a way of further opening up questions of textuality and meaning for students.

Taking the reader on a stroll through the woods to look for the elusive and unclassifiable mushroom, this essay suggests that avant-gardes can present a challenge to our familiar modes of communication in the classroom. The author argues that a truly radical pedagogic practice, corresponding to the theoretical critiques offered by recent trends in the study of rhetoric and teaching, might forestall the real danger represented by teaching the avant-garde, namely that it be domesticated and its radical potential neutralized.

Reviewed are: A Communion of Friendship: Literacy, Spiritual Practice, and Women in Recovery, by Beth Daniell; Naked in the Promised Land: A Memoir, by Lillian Faderman; and Gut Feelings: A Writer’s Truths and Minute Inventions, by Merrill Joan Gerber.

The author recalls her struggles and adaptations—to school, to anti-Semitism, to her family’s history, to her feelings for other women, to her learning disability—before there were terms to make what she experienced a familiar part of our discourse. She suggests that,because the words that might have exempted her from effort or locked her into one category or another were never spoken, she found ways to do what was required and methods of coping that have served her well in life.

ella Larsen's Passing has become one of the most widely read New Negro Renaissance novels in recent years, but no one really knows how it ends. By this I do not mean critics have not determined how much guilt to assign Irene Redfield in Clare Kendry's fatal fall, or to what extent the narrative is actually a lesbian story as a racial one. I mean the ending is actually unknowable, because the original last paragraph disappeared from the first edition's third printing, and no extant evidence can explain this change. There is no conclusive answer to the question of presenting this textual crux correctly-despite assumptions to the contrary by Larsen's editors-but I argue this textual problem itself bears an important lesson: the best response to a gap in textual knowledge is to acknowledge the absence and its causes, not to produce editions and teach classes gloss over such gaps, thereby passing on the social and cultural elements of these textual histories. More generally, I argue students and teachers can always benefit from attention to textual scholarship, and minority texts particularly need such study for what it reveals of the social and cultural interactions between minority writers and predominantly white, male publishers. The unbalanced power dynamics of this relationship produce what Gilles Deleuze terms a literature: that which a minority constructs within a major language (152). By focusing on the production history of the texts themselves, we can study the material evidence of this minor language.

The author examines the careers of Francis James Child, first professor of English at Harvard, and his followers George Lyman Kittredge and Stith Thompson to show how these early professionals’ decisions regarding audience and the relationship of literary and folkloric studies to composition helped to establish issues and audiences in English studies. She suggests that recognition of lingering limitations from the discipline’s early days may enable academics to consider different choices today.

The author suggests that if compositionists consider their work in the context of postmodern sciences such as chaos theory they may entertain the notion that order emerges from chaos in unpredictable yet comprehensible (albeit new and radical) ways. She offers the hope that such a notion may aid them in effectively resisting pressures to define themselves and their students, through practices such as retrogressive pedagogies and standardized testing, as the gatekeepers and practitioners of “order.”

The author explores how World War II changed the rationale for mass literacy in the United States from a nineteenth-century moral imperative into a twentieth-century production imperative. She suggests that we are in a similar period of reevaluation today, and that, if the capacity to fuse older and newer ideologies is at its limit, the school may find itself running behind or even against the dominant cultural imperatives for literacy in a new world order.

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Reviewed are:Public Works: Student Writing as Public Text, edited by Emily J. Isaacs and Phoebe Jackson; Re(Articulating) Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning, by Brian Huot; and What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing, by Bob Broad.

The author proposes a different way to phrase the problems that public colleges and universities face in the current economy. He argues that it is now crucial to the long–term financial well–being of public institutions of higher education to improve the working conditions of instructors in writing programs, precisely because of the relationship between those programs and the students who are the universities’ major stakeholders and future donors.

N n September of 2001, I had just begun teaching an undergraduate course entitled Writing (and) the Holocaust. When my students and I arrived in class on the eleventh, we'd each heard that something was terribly wrong in New York and Washington. By the next class, we all knew, and had seen, the worst: images of the explosions near the top of the World Trade Center towers, images of firefighters and office workers covered in debris from their collapse, and the repeated images of tangled steel while construction workers, police, and firefighters searched for the dead. We didn't directly confront the event the first couple of weeks of the semester; we didn't have to. In trying to understand how to build a knowledge of the events of the Shoah, it was impossible to hold at bay the profoundly disturbing questions about the narratives we build to explain such events, whether of 9/11 or of the Shoah. Those narratives and their alternatives-the narra-

Reviewed are: Teaching Literature. Elaine Showalter; Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind, by Gerald Graff; and Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century, by Kurt Spellmeyer.

This essay explores how photographic images of atrocity work to undo some of our assumptions about how historical narratives work, and disturb the cultural memory that allows us to write ourselves into history. It suggests a way of reading these photographic images that yields something that might be called “forgetful memory,” aspects of the event at the center of the photo that cannot be integrated into the narrative we build to contain it.

This essay suggests that Harrison’s representation of father–daughter incest in The Kiss draws on literary elements of two seemingly distinct genres, memoir and fairy tale, to tell a story of violence and violation in the white middle–class family. Through memoir, it argues, Harrison revises the moral and behavioral edicts that cultural narratives, especially traditional fairy tales dealing with father–daughter incest, seek to impose.

El s Kathryn Harrison points out, one of America's most popular misconceptions, especially in the white middle-class family, is that father-daughter incest is a rare occurrence. The crime of incest often goes unreported and unpunished in part because of a silence around it. While exact figures are hard to pin down, current data suggest that anywhere from one in four to one in three girls experiences sexual abuse at the hands of fathers or surrogate fathers. In the 1980s scholars such asJudith Herman and Diana Russell provided data that suggested incest was at least as prevalent in white middleand upper-middleclass homes as it was elsewhere.2 Far from confirming that incest only happens in certain homes, this research suggests that the sexual abuse of daughters is a ubiquitous practice that cuts across racial and class lines. Nonetheless, familiar narratives of incest construct the white middle-class family as a nurturing unit in which the rapacious father is an impossible character. In particular, these narratives often relegate incest to the homes of cultural others or attempt to dismiss a daughter's first-person account of sexual violation as fantasy (Doane and Hodges 2; Wilson). In 1997, Kathryn Harrison published her controversial memoir about fatherdaughter incest, The Kiss, a book that disturbed the silence around and as-

The authors argue for a structural revolution in English studies that builds on the epistemological ground shared by those in composition and literature. Their confederative “English studies” model integrates work in literature, discourse, language studies, and the larger culture with rhetoric and writing instruction horizontally, not hierarchically.

This essay considers why some subjects associated with English studies achieve disciplinary status while others, such as theory and multicultural literature, fail to do so, suggesting that what is required for such status is the establishment of epistemological difference from other areas in the field. The author uses the example of creative writing’s emergence as a model of what it means to achieve disciplinary status, what benefits accrue to a field that does, and who stands to gain from that emergence.

This essay focuses on the grammar–rhetoric–composition program at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlaltelolco, a sixteenth–century institution of higher education in Mexico, to argue for a more amply conceived set of colonialist beginnings for American composition. As an emergent site for North American composition–rhetoric, Tlaltelolco launched phenomena familiar to contemporary scholarship, for example composition-rhetoric as attractor for public debates about race and class, as sponsor of debased curricula for people of color, and as re–enforcer of linkages among color, class, aptitude, and local discourse practices.

The author reopens the vexed question of the use of literature in first–ear composition courses to suggest that reading and writing about literature can empower students to construct their own interpretations of cultural artifacts rather than deferring to canonical knowledge. Using his students’ work with Poe’s “Annabel Lee” as an example, he shows how such a practice can work if it places the work in a context appropriate to the literacies of first–year students and privileges the knowledge they bring with them to the academy.

t the close of the twentieth century, College English published a special issue of essays subtitled Symposium: English 1999. As the title indicates, the collected articles address contemporary English departments. Although most articles focus on the specific pedagogical or professional exigencies of English studies, the last essay of this issue, Jeffrey Williams's Brave New University, raises a more general concern about the shift in university focus from scholarship to salesmanship (742). Williams argues that the increasingly privatized structure of the university significantly redefines the goals of higher education. Rather than characterizing universities and their faculty as places where experts work for the common good, popular discourse-from films to news media-reinforces the corporate image by depicting the university within a commercial profit rationale (745). Because a supposedly new profit motive impinges on the traditional mission of the university, Williams asks that academics critique this corporatized form of higher education, distinguish the university as a not-for-profit institution, and develop representations of the university that reclaim its foundations in the public good (749-50). At the same time that I appreciate Williams's indictment of the privatized university system, I am troubled by the prevailing sentiment-among conservative and liberal thinkers alike-that the university has strayed from its civic-minded origins and transformed itself into a site of corporate demagoguery. Recent discussion surrounding the contemporary university system suggests that an altruistic, even philanthropic, ethos overwhelmingly defines our understanding of higher education's original mission. Consider, for instance, the plethora of books that emerged in the 1990s detailing the failure of higher education. While these

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Reviewed are: Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers, by Lee Ann Carroll, and Misunderstanding the Assignment: Teenage Students, College Writing, and the Pains of Growth, by Doug Hunt.

The author argues that, far from being a recent development, the corporatization of the university has been part of the often uneasy coexistence of democratic and capitalist interests throughout the history of the U.S. university system. She explores the relationship among higher education, democracy, and corporatization within Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Professor’s House to demonstrate an early public recognition of this corporatization as well as the way it has been historically obfuscated.

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College English, Volume 66, Number 2, November 2003 Johnnie M. Stover is associate professor of English at Florida Atlantic University. Her areas of instruction and research include American literatures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with specializations in African American, American Indian, and women’s literatures. Portions of this essay appear in her book, Rhetoric and Resistance in Black Women’s Autobiography (University Press of Florida, 2003). T Nineteenth-Century African American Women’s Autobiography as Social Discourse: The Example of Harriet Ann Jacobs

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