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Teaching postcolonial literature to American college students involves taking them through a dialectical process of thinking about identification. In the first stage, students are encouraged to note similarities between their own lives and those of the work’s characters. With the second step, students examine how the work’s cultural and historical context makes the characters different from them in key ways. Finally, students use the differences that they have found in order to reflect on aspects of their own situations from a new angle. The author demonstrates this process through a discussion of her experiences teaching Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1988 novel Nervous Conditions.

The authors discuss a survey of reading practices that they administered to students at their home institution, the University of Arkansas, as well as logs that students at the school kept of their daily reading acts. An important finding was that, contrary to possible belief, students at this university are reading quite a bit, although they are not spending much time on materials assigned in their courses. The authors propose some methods for boosting students’ interest in academic texts, and they call for other institutions to conduct similar studies.

The authors report their experiences teaching courses on food and food literature, arguing that these subjects have yet to be sufficiently appreciated as genuinely intellectual.

The author analyzes his experiences teaching literature courses in which he encourages students to research works by people from their hometowns. He argues that relating literature to concepts of “home” makes English classes more accessible to students while also helping them reflect on important issues in ecocriticism.

In higher education, issues of in loco parentis have been most often discussed in connection with campus administrative policies. College writing teachers need to reflect, however, on the ways they conceivably exercise parental authority in their own classrooms, through such models as the Stern Father and the Nurturing Mother.

Freak-show theories developed in disability studies can help us analyze how students with disabilities rhetorically represent these in college admissions essays. In particular, such theories draw attention to the social conditions that affect how disabilities are conceived and treated as well as depicted.

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

For the last several years, composition scholarship has unfortunately neglected the paragraph. Theories about it, however, have a rich history. Eventually, it involved conflicts between prescriptivists and descriptivists, as well as between members of the latter group and the branch of descriptivism called functionalism. Composition researchers should study the paragraph once again, this time forging connections with similar work in other disciplines.

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.

Within nineteenth-century American rhetorical culture, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s contribution was distinct. Envisioning a rhetoric that linked imagination with social action, he challenged the more mechanistic, reason-centered tendencies of rhetorical doctrines influenced by Hugh Blair.

Many graduate creative writing programs depend on “star” faculty who have been hired more because of their professional reputation as writers than because of their commitment to teaching. As a result, such programs often fail to provide reflection on teaching that would truly serve their students. One step toward alleviating this problem is to offer undergraduate courses that enable creative writing graduate students to team-teach with regular faculty.

The author identifies limitations in various approaches that Westerners have taken to non-Western rhetorical traditions. Focusing on excerpts from the Analects of Confucius, he demonstrates his own proposed approach to ancient Chinese rhetoric, emphasizing that Westerners studying it should seek to identify its discursive fields while also reflecting on their own conditions.

The authors call for tying service learning to feminist agendas. In particular, they emphasize civic activism involving true collaboration with communities. They report on a graduate seminar at their own university that worked toward this goal by having students self-reflectively participate in local organizations.

Students in college writing courses need to understand world issues, including the oppressive effects of the global economy. But their teachers need to give them a sense of agency and authority, rather than simply telling them what political positions to take. One example of a writing assignment that might engage as well as inform students involves analyzing Parade magazine’s annual list of the world’s worst dictators.

The undergraduate English curriculum should move well beyond study of the traditional Eurocentric literary canon. It should help students participate in society by teaching them how to communicate across various languages, discourses, and media.

Traditionally, college English departments have resisted granting undergraduate internships a central place in their curricula. Many of these departments do little more than allow students to pursue internships as loosely supervised independent studies. An internship practicum course such as Purdue University’s, however, enables students to reflect together on their internships, thereby helping them understand, critique, and act upon the institutional cultures they have momentarily joined.

The author suggests that English-only classrooms are not only the implicit goal of much language policy in the United States, but also assumed to be already the case, an ironic situation in light of composition’s historical role as “containing” language differences in U.S. higher education. He suggests that the myth of linguistic homogeneity has serious implications not only for international second-language writers in U.S. classrooms but also for resident second-language writers and for native speakers of unprivileged varieties of English, and that rather than simply abandon the placement practices that have worked to contain—but also to support—multilingual writers, composition teachers need to reimagine the composition classroom as the multilingual space that it is, where the presence of language differences is the default.

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.”

The author reads the essays in this issue from the perspective of work in rhetorical genre theory on the concept of “uptake” in order to examine some of the challenges and possibilities teachers as well as students face as they engage in the work of identifying and deploying multiple languages and discourses. He suggests that the essays allow us to see uptake both as a site for the operations of power and a site for intervening in those operations, as well as allowing us to see a number of such interventions underway.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

Reviewed are: Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition, by Anis Bawarshi; The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change, edited by Richard M. Coe, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko; and Writing Genres, by Amy J. Devitt.

Reviewed are The Selected Essays of Robert J. Connors,edited by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford; Writing in the Academic Disciplines: A Curricular History, by David R. Russell; Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States, by Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen; and Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910, by Nan Johnson.

Rereading the work of Letitia Elizabeth Landon in light of Hugh Blair’s 1783 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, the author suggests that current disciplinary definitions of the sublime that separate its aesthetic heritage from its rhetorical foundations suppress those of its aspects that were the particular province of women writers in the nineteenth century, and limit our current understanding.

The author raises several issues regarding cultural shifts over the last half-century that he believes were evaded in the Fall 2002 Partisan Review symposium that gives his article its title—including attitudes toward mass culture, the significance and aims of cultural studies, the roles and institutional affiliations of the conservative counterintelligentsia, and the question of intellectual honesty and civility—in the hope of fostering a more productive dialogue between right and left than has recently been the case.

In contrast to the idea that students’ instrumental views of their own education are necessarily productive of conservative middle-class values, the author describes a “work memoir” project he has developed in which working-class students reflect on and articulate their own values, memories, and expectations related to work. The students in the project, four of whom are discussed in detail in the essay, reveal far more complex concerns of identity, social capital, and acculturation.

“As if the problem of racism outside of the academy isn’t enough,” the author says, “try thinking about the ways it has informed the very notion of academy and maintains a presence in our academic institutions.” He reflects on his own position in the academy as racialized subject, educand, and educator, departing from Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of an “autoethnography” to engage in a “selfiography,” in the process interrogating not only notions of “blackness” but also the too-often-naturalized assumptions of whiteness.

[T]he Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans .[. .1 are news today because of their nationalism [. ..] examples the black [people] in this country should use in [our] struggle for independence. (And that is what the struggle remains, for independence-from the political, economic, social, spiritual and psychological domination of the white man). The struggle is not simply for equality, or betterjobs, or better schools, and the rest of those half-hearted liberal cliches; it is to completely free the black [people]from the domination of the white man. Nothing else. -LeRoi Jones

The author stretches the bounds of what we might think can and can’t be done in Pidgin, both by statement and by example: “Lotta times I get back all kine disorganized papahs dat grammatically no even make sense. But wen I tell da students dat […] I like dem write for fun, I walk around da room and I see lotta da kids stay writing in Pidgin like das da voice dat comes most natural to dem. And I’m looking over their shoulders and I’m all like WOW, dey get ideas. Stay organize. And can understand too.”

Looking at arguments put forth by courts, the State of Hawai‘i, and Native Hawaiian sovereignty activists, as well as constructions of Hawaiianness by Native Hawaiians and Locals on the mainland, the author analyzes a rhetorical shift from celebrations of cultural identity to assertions of nationhood and sovereignty on the part of Native Hawaiians that has at times made nonnative Locals feel displaced in the only “home” they have known. Both groups have had to deal with a legacy of U.S. imperialism and injustice, placing them at times in coalition to confront racism and at times in conflict.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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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ing logic of the market is intricately, if silently, bound to theories of autonomous creativity, the writer is surely caught in a bind. Considering the trials of Coleridge and Wordsworth is enough to drive one into the arms of Trollope, abjuring forever the cycle of hypomania and depression, inspiration and silence. If the market is inescapable, turn its discipline to good effect. Such is Trollope's response to Romanticism: There are those [...] who think that the man who works with his imagination should allow himself to wait till-inspiration moves him. When I have heard such a doctrine preached, I have hardly been able to repress my scorn. To me it would not be more absurd if the shoemaker were to wait for inspiration, or the tallow-chandler for the divine moment of melting (102). Trollope scorns those who wait for inspiration, and embraces the analogy of novel writing to shoe making, pointedly refusing the Romantic separation of Art from craft: A shoemaker when he has finished one pair of shoes does not sit down and contemplate his work in idle satisfaction [...]. The shoemaker who so indulged himself would be without wages half his time. It is the same with a professional writer of books [.. .]. I had now quite accustomed myself to begin a second pair as soon as the first was out of my hands (265). God is on the side not so much of the angels, as of the man who settles down to do his work here on earth, for idleness is a vice, industriousness a virtue. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Sat, 25 Jun 2016 05:12:48 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Writer's Block, Merit, and the Market 637 Just do it. This familiar marketing slogan is applicable to all walks of life, it seems. Donald Murray, in The Craft of Revision, echoes Trollope and Boice, too, when he urges writers to [make] writing a habit [ . .]. The writing becomes expected in the way you are expected to wait on tables, show up for your job in the emergency room, deliver papers. Roger Simon of the Baltimore Sun explained, 'There's no such thing as writer's block. My father drove a truck for 40 years. And never once did he wake up in the morning and say: 'I have truck driver's block today. I am not going to work' (17). There's something bracing about this. Murray appeals to the complex network of social relations any worker must enter into, which carry obligations that must be honored. The market makes us all interdependent and we are all expected to work, indeed, required to work if we need to earn our incomes. So Murray, like Trollope, urges one to internalize these obligations, which are both ethical and economic, and thus take advantage of the support this network can provide. Replace the Romantic agonies of inspiration with an ethic of work and you will be rewarded. You will have your writing, your copyright, your income, and your peace of mind. Yet the work ethic is by no means our salvation, as Max Weber's magisterial study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, makes clear. Weber argues that Protestants developed in the seventeenth century an ethic that he calls worldly asceticism (120). This ethic is motivated first by religious belief and later, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by the force of capitalist accumulation. For Calvin, the purposeful organization and arrangement of the cosmos is evidence of a divine plan, even if the will of God is mysterious. Obvious in the order of the natural world, this organization extends to the order of society as well, in which every person has a calling, a job to do. Those who are in a state of grace glorify God by fulfilling his commandments, which providentially organize social relations. Each individual Christian must therefore work in his or her calling, regardless of his or her desires, and must work methodically, honestly, prudently, steadfastly, all for the glory of God. As Weber observes, Labor in a calling was [.. .] the ascetic activitypar excellence (133). Alone in an individual relation with God, quit of priestly mediation and Roman Catholic acts of penance, the Protestant went to work and prospered. Such labor is endless since it is not a goal in itself; done conscientiously, it will yield riches on earth that represent prospectively (given the grace of God) the Protestant's reward in heaven. I sketch the theological dimensions of the Protestant ethic to stress the fact that it is predicated on deeply felt belief, and to recall how inextricable this belief is from the discourse of political economy. Weber argues that the logic of utilitarian political economy is an effect of Protestant theology and religious belief. Calvinism holds that This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Sat, 25 Jun 2016 05:12:48 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms