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.

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Notes that the minor Romantic poet John Clare commands increasing attention at academic conferences, in essay collections, and on college syllabi. Argues the practices that have kept Clare in view have also rendered him partially inaccessible to students, scholars and general readers. Suggests readers are now in possession of the materials with which to respond to and interpret Clare’s work.

Explores the notion that genres not only help define and organize kinds of texts, they also help define and organize kinds of social actions. Investigates the role genre plays in the constitution of the contexts of texts, including the identities of those who write them and those who are represented within them.

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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

Gives an account in journal format of the author’s experiences teaching writing and literature at a missionary school in Nigeria. Describes difficulties and conflicts of beliefs encountered over a period of time with her colleagues. Presents a poem from one of her teaching assistants and discusses reactions and meanings involved in the different cultures.

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Confronts the problem of applicants for admittance to graduate programs in the Humanities failing to have been told what would be wanted on their applications. Discusses helping students learn to explain their specialties to nonspecialists. Assumes that learning to summarize and “enter the conversations around one” is excellent rhetorical training regardless of the student’s profession.

Raises questions about the representability of the trauma of rape and the purposes of its representation. Focuses on how the strategic enactment of a culturally dominant rape script can potentially open up a gap within which that script can be contested and the act of rape or death resisted. Discusses pedagogical challenges of teaching the literature of trauma and survival.

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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 “I Have a Dream” is the product of African-American rhetorical traditions of ceremonial protest and jeremiad speech-making, rituals that had crystallized long before King was born. Describes the peaceful essences of the March on Washington and how it was a “Ceremonial Protest.” Considers the historical use of “I Have a Dream” over the previous 130 years.

Describes the successful public lectures of Frances Wright, and looks more closely at her career as a rhetorician trying to determine why she remains less known today than any other major female figure of the 19th century. Concludes that Wright was remembered with derision by her enemies and with regret by those who would have been her friends.

Offers a reading of “The Music Man” that traces the ways its charm and humor are undergirded by a parodic stance toward American values as rooted in turn-of-the-century discourses of literacy, education, morality, and in the simultaneously burgeoning national obsessing with buying and selling. Considers sexual and textual anxieties in the Progressive Era, “the repressed/repressive librarian,” and consumerist rhetoric.

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.”

Discusses the shift from public funding of the university to corporate sponsorship and dependence on other private sources. Acknowledges how students are forced into corporate jobs to repay school debt. Suggests using English to promote a setting which encourages students to value people over profits, enjoy access to quality education, and value open rather than corporately controlled society.

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Considers the significance of the disappearance of close reading. Looks briefly at the devastation wrought by certain “gangster theories”—indeterminacy, misreading, and the idea that people all tell stories (all knowledge is determined by the situation in which people find themselves). Suggests that close reading and close observation offer occasions to enjoy a pleasure in the exercise of mind.

Discusses negative stereotyping of the public or others in the profession of two-year college educators. Defines the open-admissions student and the emphasis on the “introductory” elements as a mission of transformation. Encourages working together towards a common goal of achievement in the profession of English Studies by crossing the border between higher education and two-year college faculty.

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.

Investigates how social class affects the educational narratives of working-class students—both their initial access to four-year institutions and their ability to persevere until they obtain bachelor’s degrees. Argues that a genuine concern with diversity should lead compositionists to question the selective functions of the academy and the role of composition in maintaining them.

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Reed Way Dasenbrock

Defends the exclusion of Shakespeare course requirements for the English Department at Indiana University by explaining that “Shakespeare can take care of himself”—students will sign up for as many Shakespeare classes as offered. Presents opposing obstacles and objectives to this curricular decision.