Focusing on students’ responses to an 1876 writing assignment at Illinois Industrial University (which would ultimately become the University of Illinois), the author analyzes ideological tensions that occurred as the United States found itself revising the pastoral image of the farmer in an increasingly industrial age.

The author critiques the much-publicized and potentially influential 2006 report of the Spellings Commission Report. He emphasizes the report’s inconsistencies, seeing these as reflecting a business model of education that neglects not only the decline in government financial support of colleges, but also the presence in them of new student populations

On various campuses, including the author’s, “safe space” stickers are used to designate offices supposedly free of homophobia. The author critiques this practice, pointing out that it still privileges the white heterosexual subject while also obscuring connections between sexuality, gender, and race.

Teaching films like Crash gives teachers and researchers the opportunity to discuss films as social texts that engage students in critical thinking and self-reflection. This particular movie is especially effective in its use of a pulp-fiction visual rhetoric. Unfortunately, the film equates and replaces the term “race” with the term “prejudice” and then argues that everyone is a little prejudiced. The result is a missed opportunity to investigate whiteness as a powerful social construction.

“Crash”’s most disturbing lesson seems to be that everybody—even a mean, sadistic cop—has a good side and reasons for his or her racist acts, for which they can be forgiven. This emphasis is a failure to analyze the heterogeneity of experiences among members of various races and ethnicities. Nevertheless, the film is worth teaching, especially if a class compares it with a film such as Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke. Lee’s documentary on Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans is a model for reconstructing with students a history and system of beliefs and practices, so that they deepen their analysis of any cultural phenomenon, artifact, or event.

Reviewed are A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature, edited by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong and Stephen H. Sumida, Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers, edited by King-Kok Cheung, and Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images, edited by M. Evelina Galang.

The authors explore the interdependent relationships between learning English(es) and learning digital literacies in global contexts, and, collaborating with two women who have moved and continue to move between the United States and Asia, highlight the crucial role that the practice of guanxi has played in advancing digital literacies. Their collaboration suggests that guanxi is a useful term for describing not only the multifarious constellations of connections and resources that structure the lives of individuals, but also for understanding how these connections are related to the social, cultural, ideological, and economic formations that structure the “information age.”

Tracing the effects of the “laissez-faire” postcolonial politics of language in the United States, which in fact enabled English to become the dominant language through cultural rather than institutional means, the essay then suggests how the linguistic memory that emerges from decolonization and nation building continues, often in unsuspected ways, to influence the language policy of the modern U.S. university and U.S. college composition. The author argues for a national language policy that moves beyond the notion of language as a right, with its lingering assumptions of English monolingualism as an ultimate goal, and instead fosters a linguistic culture where being multilingual is both normal and desirable.

The author suggests that models positioning the multilingual writer as passively conditioned by “interference” from his or her first language, as well as more correlative models of the interrelationships of multiple languages in writing, need to be revised. Analyzing works written to different audiences, in different contexts, and in different languages by a prominent Sri Lankan intellectual, the author instead suggests a way of understanding multilingual writing as a process engaged in multiple contexts of communication, and multilingual writers as agentive rather than passive, shuttling creatively among languages, discourses, and identities to achieve their communicative and rhetorical objectives.

The author uses the example of a text a student was not allowed to display on his course website to explore how and why institutional ideologies particular to the historical development of composition and creative writing—especially when viewed in conjunction with current copyright law—render students’ multimedia compositions illegitimate. He suggests that the ideological apparatuses of writing instruction and the legal statutes of U.S. culture at large combine to radically restrict the production and circulation of students’ multimedia texts and inhibit students’ power as writers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The author suggests that Saul Alinsky’s concept of community organization, a theory of action devised for neighborhoods rather than for higher education, might offer a new model of service-learning, and describes the Community Educators’ Collaborative at Temple University as one example of how such a model might work.

instruction and service-learning over the last few years. Studies in the midto late nineties described courses and institutional arrangements and began to explore the ramifications for composition and English studies (Schutz and Gere; Herzberg; Peck, Flower, and Higgins). Linda Adler-Kassner and her colleagues edited an influential volume in 1997 that signaled the arrival of this new approach as a major pedagogical movement, and in 2000 Tom Deans's Writing Partnerships gave us a basic framework for thinking about the cooperative relationship between students and the organizations they encounter in these courses. More recent work has focused on how community-based learning can be sustained over time through faculty research (Cushman), how to address the gap between community and academic discourses (Chaden, Graves, Jolliffe, and Vandenberg), and what contradictions we must struggle with in intercultural inquiry (Flower), each study highlighting strategies for respecting the needs and abilities of participating community partners. In a crucial step toward establishing the institutional structures necessary for sustained partnership, Jeffrey T. Grabill and Lynde Lewis Gaillet have urged us to focus on the interface between writing programs and community partners. The need for a balanced and nonexploitive relationship in community-based learning asserts itself insistently in our discussions of this approach, and clearly at this stage writing program administrators must become much more active in developing institutional models that promise true mutual benefits for postsecondary schools and their off

Challenging views of working-class white students that either displace all white racism onto them or, at best, see them as having exchanged class consciousness for race privilege, the author argues for a critical race pedagogy that includes a more complex image of poor and working-class whites. She argues for both deconstructive pedagogies that can expose the role of language in maintaining racist and classist structures and reconstructive pedagogies that can provide students with the rhetorical tools for employing language transformatively.

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.

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.

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.”

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-

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.

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.

Incites inquiry as to how modern American literature reflects on the problem of identity. Spotlights the contribution to modern American writing by Wallace Thurman’s "Harlem" fiction. Endeavors to link a racial imperative to a sexual imperative by means of a current theoretical discourse surrounding notions of city and community life.

Investigates how disability is discovered, constructed, and performed in a certain type of cultural practice, that is, in a postmodern, undergraduate college classroom. Argues that the implementation of an autobiographical pedagogy must extend beyond the dimensions of race, gender, and sexuality and must include disabled persons in these discussions as well.

Presents a debate between traditionalist ideas from Xin Lin Gale and postmodern ideas from Cheryl Glenn and Susan Jarratt. Quotes Gale who says that you cannot have it both ways, foundational and antifoundational: using the historical evidence to champion Aspasia while at the same time "reclaiming" her from the biases of those very documents. Notes Jarratt’s response to the contrary.

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ssessment is a peculiar field within college English studies. In one sense, every faculty member is engaged directly in it, assigning, responding to, and grading student papers; many members of English departments also participate in one way or another in placement testing for entering students or in mid-career or exit writing assessments for more advanced students. In another sense, external assessment of our work is always there in subtle and unacknowledged ways, defining what we do and how well we do it, how much power we can exert in controlling our curriculum, and how our scholarly work is valued. In this second sense, even more than in the first, assessment affects the way our work is perceived by others inside and outside the academy and hence helps determine the resources we receive for everything from duplicating to new faculty positions. The common misperceptions of our fieldthat as writing teachers we are picky grammarians and value flowery prose or as literature teachers we are irresponsible revolutionaries, for instance-are damaging cliches that arise in large part from assessment gone awry. Once we are evaluated as unable to fulfill our roles, no one in a position of power need take seriously our claims, and our discipline becomes easy to dismiss as an expensive frill. We will defend our private world of assessment as a matter between our students and us, at most a matter to be shared with our colleagues. But that public world of external assessment seems beyond our reach, if-not our ken, and our instincts are always to withdraw, to claim professional privilege. Yet with so much at stake, no English faculty member can avoid involvement in assessment, although many of us would prefer to see our work in other terms. In yet another sense, writing assessment has become an important specialty

Explores the place of faculty and faculty values in the process of assessing the work of higher education. Searches to find better ways to put the intellectual work of faculty and students at the center of the educational concerns and at the center of assessment models. Suggests that faculty should devote themselves to teaching the first-year course.

Notes that writing assessment has become an important specialty within composition studies with links to such “suspicious partners” as educational research, statistics, and politics and with profound effects on public policy and educational funding. Discusses the modern era of writing assessment beginning during the fall of 1971 an its implications. Considers assessment as a site of conflict.

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Examines how a number of modern innovative authors use chronological progression, causal connection, and narrative voice in their novels. Analyzes texts by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jeanette Winterson, noting the areas of connection and disjunction between the theoretical claims and actual practice of experimental authors.

Presents a critical review of the three historical studies of Aspasia written by feminist historians. Asks how historians and scholars can write radically alternative histories of rhetoric without compromising their credibility.

exercise that they see as merely academic. If anything governs this work, it is the attention to the requirements of a particular form. Students dutifully present claims, back the claims with evidence and reasons, which they warrant as needed. They consider alternative positions to show that they have canvased all or most reasonable points of view and, further, that they have qualified their position in light of these other viewpoints. The result is a well-formed essay that, I suspect, has little if any impact on anybody. I suspect further that the students at some level sense this. And if they do, then the composition of an argument becomes primarily a formal exercise, and, more important, it inadvertently teaches a cynical lesson: the production of arguments is a charade, no one actually attends to them, and at best they are a mask for how real power operates-those who have power pretty much do what they want. There is a Creon-like commitment to the rhetoric of public reason because one knows in advance that this reason will have little impact on anyone or involve little risk to the one who argues. This is the dark vision that has haunted the rhetorical tradition. If students need confirmation of this view, all they have to do is look to the way that Congress and large corporations work. Serious argument is often impotent when it encounters the power of well-entrenched and well-financed interest groups. Reason and argument become the cover for the operation of powerful lobbying groups indifferent to the consequences of their actions for others. If the operation of such power is the reality, what then are the consequences for teaching argument? This is an especially important question for a democracy and an even more important question for a democracy in which there is only limited citizen participation. Unlike fifth century BCE Athens, we do not have a face-to-face democracy, so our courses in argument cannot pretend to be a straightforward preparation for a commonly available political life. Most of us are not leisured gentlemen free to attend to the direct business of governing our cities and states. Instead, we occupy a complex position toward current discourses of power, be they civic or corporate, and what we need is a rich and complex sense of the opportunities and limits of argument. What we need to explore is the value of argument given the way that power is held in the contemporary world. Texts like Antigone offer an alternative to the current teaching of argument, for they see argument as problematic. They offer no easy or mechanical solutions but pose argument as a problem and offer it for serious reflection. Other scholars have argued for the value of teaching literature as argument (Fisher and Filloy), but I am advocating something else. What I am proposing is that literary texts such as Antigone be taught as theoretical works in argument. These works would allow us to teach argument as a philosophical or political problem and not as a mode of presenting evidence for purposes of justifying claims. Instead, they would raise questions as to why arguments so often fail, and they would open students to questions of why, given the unlikeliness of success, someone might argue. And a course based on such texts This content downloaded from 157.55.39.116 on Sun, 18 Sep 2016 06:21:01 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Presents a definition for a formalist approach to teaching argument and discusses limitations and serious problems with this approach. Discusses “Antigone” as a representative text for teaching argument because it challenges the very possibility of argument. Proposes that literary texts such as “Antigone” be taught as theoretical works in argument.

Discusses the controversy of mistrusting memory. Considers how the body gives form to memorial categories whose manifestation emerges in the metaphors of everyday use. Shows that the conception of memory model bears no relationship to a faculty that the brain sciences now conceive as a dynamic maker of meaning defined by temporality and transformation rather than fixed spatial location.

Discusses how education is still a profession held hostage by images. Presents concerns dealing with racial expectations in the field of English education. Focuses and concentrates on the contents of the English language and literature professions that, although acknowledging its many diversities, avoids the distraction of “finding someone to look the part.”

Explores how new media technologies might converge with the leveling between “story” and “archive,” and how that convergence will shape the future of English Studies, focusing on electronic archives of literary and historical materials. Concludes that the central challenge in using new media with students, particularly hypertext pedagogies, is in finding the right synthesis of disciplinary design and disciplined design.

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Suggests that moves to dispersed authorship signal not a challenge to the old ideology of authorship, but rather its appropriation for commercial ends. Identifies alternatives to this appropriation and explains why embracing these alternatives is important. Concludes that scholars of rhetoric and composition need to identify, theorize, practice, and teach alternative forms of subjectivity and alternative modes of ownership.

States that a number of college literature and composition teachers have shown that they care intensely about ethical issues, although they express themselves in the language of postmodernism rather than that of traditional ethics. Claims the traditional ethical goal of building “character” can be harmonized with the postmodern effort to build “selves”--persons with a “useful” ethical center.

Discusses Willa Cather’s novel “Lucy Gayheart,” which provides the only public access to Cather’s sense of connection to Virginia Woolf, a writer she admired. Uses Cather’s “provocative” placement of Mrs. Ramsay as a way to re-frame thinking about this novel. Considers it as an experimental modernist novel.

Reflects on Paulo Freire’s place in pedagogical history and why his representation of the power of teaching holds such an appeal for so many educators. Considers why it is that the image of the teacher as liberator of the oppressed, upon which Freire’s pedagogy relies so heavily, has had such a perduring appeal.

Focuses on images of teachers (particularly English teachers) in films. Argues that understanding how society views teachers through the prism of cultural imagination can productively challenge the profession to create its own pedagogical images. Suggests that, although these films depict the teacher’s sexuality to define its proper limits, the drama of eroticized teaching obscures larger concerns over classroom politics.