Discusses the first comprehensive examination of the system of public education in Hawai‘i, conducted in 1920. Notes the great importance of the study since it not only evaluated Hawaii‘s educational system but also provided the territorial government some gauge of Hawaii‘s status as a United States territory and its success in meeting the ideals of America.

Addresses the climate of disappointment that characterizes English studies generally and composition studies--particularly writing program administration (WPA). Considers that the context of disappointment is shaped by a number of overlapping factors including: the widely perceived job market collapse in the humanities; the national abuse of adjunct teachers of first-year writing courses; and the general devaluation of the humanities.

Discusses the relation between professional training and a humanities education. Notes that the humanities in general education and English studies in particular face pressure, in the wake of poststructuralism, to address extra-academic audiences--particularly working-class, working-poor, and lower-middle-class families--with a revised articulation of what a liberal arts education offers.

Addresses an underlying assumption that teaching is a skill that can be acquired by the proper training, rather than intellectual work deserving of study. Suggests an alternative basis for teacher development by promoting and demonstrating a process of pedagogical inquiry.

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Discusses how the rise of a culture of professionalism--and the attitudes, institutions, and interests that separate and define those within a profession from others--has been of great interest to historians and sociologists, and also to professors of literature. Draws attention to the ways in which professionalization channels discord into a few acceptable forms.

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Examines the far-reaching cultural implications of a kind of writing not usually deemed culturally significant--school assignments. Studies 44 papers written in 1898 by senior class members of the Platteville Normal School in southwestern Wisconsin assigned to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Wisconsin’s statehood. Examines the cultural work accomplished by these student writers in their own time and place.

reative writers exist as a group both inside and outside the academic community. Inside academia, the pursuit of creative writing as a graduate degree specialization is typically associated with the M.FA. However, another option, the Ph.D., also exists. I am the recipient of a Ph.D. in English with emphasis in creative writing, alternatively called the Ph.D. in English with creative dissertation. Like many of my colleagues who hold this degree, I also have an M.FA. in creative writing. I entered graduate school as a master's student to become a better writer, and a better scholar. While I was there, I also developed the desire to become a teacher. Told that the M.EA. was not sufficient for a university teaching position (without the all-important multiple books that many positions require), and without significant training or opportunity from my M.EA. program in teaching, let alone in the teaching of creative writing, I entered into a Ph.D. program in English/creative writing with hopes that this program would teach me how to teach in my field. But as a graduate student who did not know which way she might turn (teacher or writer? could I be both?), I was puzzled by the lack of attention on the part of my university to the pedagogy of my field. I took seminars, completed language and oral and written comprehensive examinations, and defended my dissertation-a booklength collection of poems-but heard little about what it might mean to enter a university teaching position, or what teaching creative writing as a professional writer/ teacher might involve. I consider myself to be one of the lucky ones: I took a graduate course in the teaching of composition and then taught composition, feeling well-prepared; I then taught creative writing, feeling less prepared, as a graduate student and postgraduate lecturer. This valuable experience allowed me to recently secure a tenure-track position teaching composition and co-directing a composition

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Describes the experiences of the author as she tries to transfigure her students enrolled in freshman writing and college preparatory writing classes at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon (located in the “dry side” of the state). Addresses students' racism, homophobia, and distrust of their own skills in writing.

Seeks to add another vocabulary to the pedagogy of the creative writing workshop: the language of use and action, of practice and implementation. Investigates how to reform the discursive walls between creativity and theory and ends by suggesting how educators might bring classrooms and communities together.

Suggests that the teaching of both composition and creative writing would benefit from focusing less exclusively on the writing process and products and more on the writing subject. Claims that focusing on the writing subject through the lens of psychoanalysis provides several potential benefits. Concludes psychoanalysis can be a filtrate for the creative writing or composition teacher.

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Notes that university teaching is, for better as well as worse, what many American literary writers do for a living. Notes the author was determined from the beginning to be a full time writer, but now faces declining income. Describes his reluctance for university teaching. Proposes four “alternative” writing courses he would be willing to teach.

eaching and the 'Alternative' Writer by Richard Kostelanetz is about Richard Kostelanetz: whether Richard wants to take a university teaching position if one is offered; what he might teach if he does take such a position; and how he might avoid becoming an academic of the sort he describes, having so easily divided the universe of writers in this country into independents and academics. First, let me say that I have long known and admired Richard's work (though I have never met him) and that I hope his artistic productivity continues long into the future, perhaps untainted by the university work he contemplates doing. Second, let me say for the time being that I will not attack this essay for its obvious use of easy binaries (e.g., the independent writer/academic writer split); it is unnecessary to do so. What I would like to do is offer a reading of Richard's essay by placing it in the context of both the isolation voiced by others in the profession as well as the loneliness I have expressed unconsciously in three pieces I have written at different times during my career. My point is that some of the feelings Richard expresses evoke certain strong feelings in me. Not what Richard says, but how he says it, brings to mind for me a session I attended last year at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), a session that introduced me to what for lack of a better phrase we might call rhetorics of emotion. I believe Richard has written such a piece. Unknowingly over the past twenty years, I believe I have too.

Examines (1) job opportunities available for PhDs in creative writing as contextualized within the larger English Studies job market; (2) arguments for and against training such candidates to be university teaching professionals; and (3) training that might better prepare these candidates for both more productive, successful university teaching careers as well as more productive, successful undergraduate creative writing classrooms.

Hindman introduces the articles in this special focus on personal writing. In these articles, the authors strive to clarify what is meant by “the personal” and “personal writing,” and to suggest criteria for measuring the effectiveness of personal writing.

Teaching, like politics, can be considered to be the “art of repetition.” But teaching, again like politics, is also capable of enlarging our political views by challenging current arguments or by examining the limitations of the argument. The four books reviews here, which examine race, culture, and sexuality, are poised to inform the politics of their readers, but find themselves bound by the problem of political mantras. Says Stockton: “Never have so few propositions been repeated by so many in such a shore time over such a broad range.” Although not without merit, all four books struggle with politicized texts that have all been done before.

Considers how constructing a hopeful professional discourse requires substantial revision of current professional discursive practices. Notes that the search for local knowledge and a shared, more hopeful discourse has rekindled interest in the rhetorical as well as material authority of ideologies, in various forms of writing collected under the overdetermined rubric "the personal." (SG)

Deborah Brandt, Ellen Cushman, Anne Ruggles Gere, Anne Herrington, Richard E. Miller, Victor Villanueva, Min-Zhan Lu, Gesa Kirsch, The Politics of the Personal: Storying Our Lives against the Grain. Symposium Collective, College English, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Sep., 2001), pp. 41-62

This symposium presents a written dialogue of scholars expressing not only excitement but also frustration over the ways in which current work in composition and literacy studies has explored the politics of the personal.

In three voices - one as a scholar, one as a writer, and one as an alcoholic - Hindman considers the question: in what ways can our own personal writing illuminate the theory and practice of teaching composition? Demonstrating the process of composing the self within the professional, she responds both passionately and personally to literary criticisms about recovery discourse. Her purpose is to “make writing matter” and, in doing so, to attempt to dispel the tension between competing versions of how the self is constructed. She also considers how, in and for recovery, she learned to write, and how it has affected her professional writing. This type of writing, which she has called “embodied rhetoric,” offers lessons for composing a better life.

Andrew Hoberek, John Burt, David Kadlec, Jamie Owen Daniel, Shelly Eversley, Catherine Jurca, Aparajita Sagar, , Twentieth-Century Literature in the New Century: A Symposium, College English, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Sep., 2001), pp. 9-33

The arrival of the new century marks a significant, yet still unknown, transformation for scholars of twentieth century literature. What was once contemporary and ongoing has now become historical. While it is unlikely that scholars will divide themselves on those terms, it is perhaps time to begin a long-needed overhaul of the category “Twentieth Century Literature.” The study of twentieth century literature has been divided into genres, subgenres, into cultures and subcultures, by geography, and even by authors, but perhaps the time is coming where, much like specialists of nineteenth century literature, those scholars of twentieth century literature will be required to have a broader range of knowledge of the century’s literary works. The impact on the profession can only be speculated. The educated guesses provided here in this symposium are the results of a panel that convened at the 1999 MLA Convention.

Opponents of expressivist writing pedagogy claim that encouraging the personal narrative in first-year rhetoric classis is a great disservice to students. Supporters of personal writing responded by making personal writing activities supplemental to traditional academic writings. Spigelman posits that personal narratives can actually serve the same purpose as academic writing and can accomplish serious scholarly work.

lthough at first glance they might seem like strange companion texts, William Attaway's Blood on the Forge (1941) and Harriette Amow's The Dollmaker (1954) share key thematic elements pertaining to the experiences of migrants from rural Appalachia to multiethnic industrial centers of the urban north during the first half of the twentieth century. To be sure, there are substantial differences between the two texts. Blood on the Forge follows the lives of three male African American protagonists, brothers Melody, Chinatown, and Big Mat Moss, from a life of sharecropping in Kentucky to a steel-mill town resembling World War I-era Homestead, Pennsylvania. Recruited along with other black migrants as strikebreakers to a community whose largest block of laborers are Slavic immigrants, the Moss brothers soon find themselves pitted against their unionized white fellow workers. In addition to the double bind of marginalization from white labor unions and exploitation by industrial capitalists, the Moss brothers simultaneously must deal with pressing issues of familial and cultural dislocation. As I elaborate in this essay, Attaway marks these dislocations primarily through his accounts of the Moss brothers' encounters with radically new forms of labor and labor technology. Like many social realist novelists of his day, Attaway offers readers no idealized resolution to the Moss brothers' rather bleak dilemma. Rather, the novel's tragic conclusion finds Big Mat slain while work-

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Considers how enterprising marketers quickly realized they had little to lose by supporting a goal of equal “representation.” Suggests that if the goal is to have a genuine impact in playing the popular culture game, now might be a prudent moment to take an interest in the kinds of research emerging from business schools.

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Argues that a lack of language legislation is indicative of a pervasive, tacit policy of "English Only" in composition and of a constellation of assumptions about languages, and language users that continues to cripple public debate on English Only and compositionists' approaches to matters of "error." Proposes an approach to language and "error" considering the relations of language to power.

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Argues that a lack of language legislation is indicative of a pervasive, tacit policy of “English Only” in composition and of a constellation of assumptions about languages, and language users that continues to cripple public debate on English Only and compositionists’ approaches to matters of “error.” Proposes an approach to language and “error” considering the relations of language to power.

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Discusses how both novels share key thematic elements pertaining to the experiences of migrants from rural Appalachia to multiethnic industrial centers of the urban north. Notes that a focus on the authors' handling of material culture helps to point one with increased clarity and precision to the writerly method by which Attaway and Arnow convey particular themes effectively.