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

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.

1^y mother is never late for anything. In fact, she's infuriatingly early for doctor's appointments, movies, personal dates. When my siblings and I were kids, we heard over and over again, Hurry up. You don't wanna be late. My brother Guy and I are our mother's children-never late for anything, usually five or ten minutes early. My habit of being early has paid off for me, I have to admit. I've gotten the job more than once because I was the first one there. Employers see me as dependable and conscientious, and my friends know they can count on me to be there when I say I will. My sister Sue, though, chose to respond to our mother's chronic promptness by rebelling-she's late for everything. When I lived with her for a year in Anchorage, I found myself adopting her way of thinking for a while. Doctor's appointment across town in twenty minutes? Sure, I've still got time to eat

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n 1937 Meridel Le Sueur authored a textbook, Worker Writers, for use in writing classes she offered under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration in Minnesota. To illustrate for her students the basic principles of storytelling and narrative technique, Le Sueur included an annotated version of her short story, Biography of My Daughter. The story focuses on the firstperson narrator's visit to a state-run sanitarium to see a young friend, Rhoda. Upon arriving at the hospital, the narrator learns she has come too late: Rhoda has died. Although her friend's death will be officially attributed to tuberculosis, the narrator knows that months of anxiously searching for a job; of working sixteen hours a day when employment was to be had; and of standing in long relief lines when no jobs were available had punished Rhoda's body beyond repair. The narrator recognizes that Rhoda has died of starvation (29; all page numbers refer to the first edition of Worker Writers). As the narrator drives back to Minneapolis with Rhoda's grieving family, they pass through fields with round pumpkins [...] corn fattening, [and] melons like the crescent moons of the season (34). The abundance of the natural world stands in stark contrast to the privations known by Rhoda and other women like her during the Great Depression. From the narrator's perspective, a system of proprietary control of resources by private individuals has led to grotesque social inequities and created a world in which young women like Rhoda starve amidst abundance. In using Biography of My Daughter as an illustrative short story in Worker Writers, Le Sueur astutely highlights important tensions between public property and private ownership. For Le Sueur, a social activist and member of the Commu-

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Explores a connection that inhered in ancient practices, a connection not as apparently relevant to contemporary pedagogy, but just might be: that between rhetorical training and athletic training. Looks at two considerations that help render more salient the cultural and historical connections. Discusses how the sophists emphasized the materiality of learning, the corporeal acquisition of rhetorical movements through rhythm, repetition, and response.

Focuses on the kind of assessment that takes place within a classroom context, and therefore looks at assessing, grading, or testing writing, since when educators talk about classroom assessment they talk of grades and tests, at times using all three terms interchangeably. Hopes to draw educators into new conversations about assessment and the teaching of writing.

s Kathleen Yancey points out in her history of writing assessment, evaluation in some form or another has been an important part of college writing courses for over fifty years (“Looking”). Yancey’s history recognizes the often conflicted nature of assessment for the teaching of writing. Although most writing teachers recognize the importance and necessity of regular assessment, they are also rightly concerned about the adverse effects assessment can have on their classrooms and students. This essay focuses on the kind of assessment (I use the words assessment and evaluation interchangeably, distinguishing both from either testing or grading) that takes place within a classroom context, and therefore looks at assessing, grading, or testing writing, since when we talk about classroom assessment we talk of grades and tests, at times using all three terms interchangeably. This slippage of assessment, grading, and testing as interchangeable provides a discourse about assessment that is often critical and unexamined. The result of these strong connections among grading, testing, and assessing writing is that any possible connection between the teaching and the evaluating of student writing is seldom questioned or discussed. This has led us as a profession to believe that assessing student writing somehow interferes with our ability to teach it. There are of course some notable exceptions. For example, Edward M. White’s germinal text is called Teaching and Assessing Writing, and he includes the ways in which formal assessments such as holistic scoring can benefit classroom practice; but even White divides assessment and teaching into separate entities that can affect each other. Certainly portfolios have been constructed by some (Elbow, “Foreword”;

or rhetoric and composition, the last decade of the twentieth century might be deemed Return of the Ancients. In many ways, contemporary scholars have taken up an earlier resurgence of the ancients, one that began decades earlier with what have since become standard historical treatments of the ancients (Kennedy, Kerferd, and Guthrie), and, perhaps most notably, in 1972, when Rosamond Kent Sprague's volume The Older Sophists made available the sophistic fragments in translation for the first time. But recent work aims to be more connective: rather than writing history for the sake of history, scholars such as Janet Atwill, Richard Enos, Susan Jarratt, John Poulakos, Takis Poulakos, Kathleen Welch, Victor Vitanza, and most recently Jeffrey Walker (Rhetoric) have reclaimed, refigured, and reread Aristotle, Isocrates, and the sophists, delineating ways in which these ancient figures might help us reframe or reconsider contemporary debates about pedagogy. The connections to feminism (arratt), cultural studies (T. Poulakos and Welch), postmodernism (Vitanza and Atwill) and the liberal arts (Atwill and Walker) have been convincing enough to spark renewed and broadened interest in how the ancients conceptualized rhetoric, how they taught, what they did. In many ways what follows is also a return to the ancients, but rather than attempt to connect the ancients to discourse already in circulation-an important task, to be sure-I want to instead explore a connection that inhered in ancient practices, a connection that isn't as apparently relevant to contemporary pedagogy, but as I will suggest just might be: that between rhetorical training and athletic training. It is important to note at the outset, as many writers have pointed out (for

Explores some queer and performative objections, challenges, and counterproposals to the identity-based pedagogies still dominating composition studies and closely related fields, bringing to the foreground pedagogies that take the instability of identity as a starting point and move toward even greater deconstruction. Proposes a tentative theoretical (re)solution that dis/integrates the binary underlying these “two” approaches to praxis.

Considers how in the contemporary world, queer theory mediates in culture between normative ideologies and material practices, between intellectual inquiry and social activism, between text and context, between teaching and learning. Presents an introduction for this special issue, noting that the essays collected represent pedagogical interventions that are theoretically informed by queer scholarship.

Analyzes Grendel ("Beowulf"), the Green Knight ("Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"), and the Pardoner ("The Canterbury Tales"). Notes that they are all "queer" characters in that they are not typical men of the time and they all pose a challenge or threat to normative homosocial desire. Suggests that traditional readings of these characters have obscured their disruptive queerness.

ver ten years have now passed since Judith Butler's Gender Trouble began making trouble with its challenges to the systems of gender and sexuality. The book has been translated into nine languages; anniversary editions have been released, and Butler has revisited and revised its central claims in subsequent articles, interviews, and book-length works. In short, Gender Trouble, and, most particularly, the theory of performativity delineated within this book, has remained on postmodern theory's center stage since its 1990 appearance. Butler asserts that the incredible life of this text has far exceeded her original and more modest intentions for it, and she credits the continually changing context of its reception for Gender Trouble's endurance (Preface vii). While Butler's humility and attribution to audiences here are refreshing, Gender Trouble's central claims did constitute theoretical interventions of the first order, disrupting feminism as many of us knew it, and helping to found queer theory in the process. Subverting common-sense beliefs that gender and sexuality are fundamental truths of the self, Gender Trouble (in what are now statements of their own commonplace familiarity) tells us instead that both are always acts, expressions, behaviors, which, like performative speech acts, bring into existence that which they name, and, through their repetition, come to constitute the identities they are purported to be. In other

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.

Argues that Vida Dutton Scudder’s pedagogy predicted a college–community connection increasingly popular one hundred years later: service learning. Outlines Scudder’s teaching, settlement work, and the ideologies underlying both; critiques her work with the benefit of 21st–century hindsight; and concludes by reaffirming that in the context of her times she was a remarkable figure.

Hopes to promote recognition of the importance of the intersections between discourse, place, and environment through theoretical examinations and pedagogical approaches. Offers some preliminary working definitions for ecocomposition and examines the evolution of ecocomposition; distinguishes between ecocomposition and ecocriticism; and offers some perspectives on ecocomposition pedagogy.

Review of the following books: (1) Collision Course: Conflict, Negotiation, and Learning in College Composition by Russel K. Durst, (2) Mutuality in the Rhetoric and Composition Classroom by David Wallace and Helen Rothschild Ewald, and (3) Teaching Composition as a Social Process by Bruce McComiskey.

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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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Considers if American Ebonics is a different language from English or if it is a dialect of English. Discusses how American Ebonics relates to the larger Ebonics picture Focuses on the grammatical patterns of Ebonics that diverge the most from standard English. Addresses pedagogical implications.

he call for improved educational assessment, and specifically the assessment of writing programs, has become louder and more urgent in the past decade. I want here to explore the place of faculty and faculty values in the process of assessing the work of higher education. How can we find better ways to put the intellectual work of faculty and students at the center of our educational concerns and, as a consequence, at the center of assessment models? A focus on first-year writing courses seems to me to be especially fruitful in responding to these questions. A university education is the work faculty and students do together, work pursued closely and undertaken carefully over time. This being the case, the first-year writing course (often the only course required of all students at a college or university) can clarify in crucial ways the primary place of intellectual work-of study and thought-in our understanding of the meaning and purposes of the university. Such a clarification can thereby help to resist the commodification of education and the corporatization of its institutions. As I have argued elsewhere,1 the first-year course should not be foundational to but rather be organic with the rest of the curriculum; it should not ground but enact the intellectual work of the university; it should not anticipate but begin the students' education. Language that conceptualizes the first-year course in terms of foundation, preparation, and anticipation narrativizes and scaffolds this course in order to empty it out: the meaning of the course is elsewhere. Its outcomes, not its work, give it its value.

Argues that both composition and literary studies have a common pedagogical vocation and that by harvesting some very general insights from two decades of cultural critique, English departments can develop curricula that will resolve a good deal of the conflict between literature and composition and improve instruction in both.

Argues that both composition and literary studies have a common pedagogical vocation and that by harvIndicates how current stylistic criticism might engage ideological issues by more fully developing M. Bakhtin’s ideas through an approach called cultural stylistics. Notes that Bakhtin’s own work was very much concerned with the divorce between ideological and formalist analysis, and his “sociological stylistics” was intended to synthesize the two.

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Urges compositionists to reframe Writing across the Curriculum (WAC) to reach beyond university boundaries. Reviews calls for an expanded conception of WAC, describes a program that carries writing instruction and literacy research beyond university boundaries, and suggests problems and benefits that may accompany this change of orientation for writing programs.

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.

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.

Discusses the topic of reading typographical errors as an example of archival work. Suggests that reading typos is a practice within textual scholarship which is a rather venerable if now somewhat overshadowed tradition of humanistic research and pedagogy. Begins with two examples of typo reading and then presents some general claims about editing as a paradigm for critical interpretation.

Describes two ways that teaching and responding to student writing are being pressured by rapidly developing technologies now being introduced into educational institutions. Discusses (1) the increasing replacement of face-to-face contact by “virtual” interaction via multimedia technology, e-mail communication systems, and the recently expanded capabilities of the World Wide Web; and (2) distance education.

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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.

Concentrates specifically on the experience of using “Maus” (a narrative in comic strip form) with one class which met in spring 1996, after the accidental killing of a Black child by a Hasidic Jew in Crown Heights, New York. Uses the text at Medgar Evers College in a freshman composition course which also functions as an introduction to literature. Describes the classroom dynamics.

his essay explores the convergence we see between projects in ethnographic research and composition pedagogy that emphasize the critical power of experience.Though their aims are usually described differently, both ethnographers and composition teachers confront similar ethical issues of representing the populations they work with and the changes that may arise from that work.Both thus face the challenge of negotiating differences and power.The course of these negotiations, we argue, depends on what experience is taken to mean and how it can be used.Signs of this convergence between ethnography and composition pedagogy appear in both the shared ideals and the shared dilemmas reported in recent accounts and critiques of such projects.We have in mind those projects which attend to the politics of their research and teaching methods in pursuit of their commitment to socially emancipatory ends.Many ethnographers and teachers might see themselves as working for socially emancipatory ends (if defining these in different ways), and presumably all would be concerned with methodology.For us, however, critical ethnography and pedagogy approach methodology not strictly in terms of its efficiency in producing or transmitting knowledge to inform subsequent (social) practice but in terms of its effects as social practice.Critical ethnography and pedagogy thus reject the possibility of a politically neutral stance or practice before, during, and after contact between researchers and informants, or teachers and students.

ror Has Two Faces-in class no less-with Jane Gallop's essay, Teacher's Breasts, and you find an apparent contradiction. The professor played by Barbra Streisand blithely lectures about sexuality and casually acknowledges students' awareness of her breasts, shown off in a low-cut black dress; Gallop, however, contends that teacher's create a conflict about the question of sex and, thus, the question of (84-85). In Gallop's view, teacher's display of authority makes male student more not less recalcitrant, and more not less in struggle for power (86). As usual, Gallop offers a startling interpretation: breast-singular, symbolic, and maternal-is precisely imaginary organ of nurturance, what good feminist teacher proffers to her daughterstudents. Refusing to nurture, . . . bad, sexual teacher brings into discourse of feminist pedagogy not breast, which is already appropriately there, but breasts (87). By mentioning her in plural, Streisand sexualizes literature classroom, exactly as camera does when it follows boys hurrying to class or pans intensely yearning students' faces. Streisand's movie demonstrates these cultural politics, showing how female teacher's sexuality has to be managed in order to avoid threat of sexual power struggle Gallop accurately predicts. What we see in Streisand is a version of Gallop's theory: maternal breast-safe and good-is opposed to more dangerous plural breasts, offered promiscuously to class's gaze. The erotics of literature classroom in Hollywood imagination comes as no surprise. Hollywood eventually misrepresents all professions, and all voca