Argues that issues of generic hybridity embody multicultural literature while promoting another kind of multiculturalism that reflects the current debates about literary canons in general and the field of American literature in particular. Considers how a reading of texts that relies on all of their component parts allows literature to perform a vital function, to foster an informed and compassionate vision of the different.

Discusses the complexity of naming nonfiction as a class of written works. Struggles with many different possible definitions of nonfiction and considers the problems with many of the definitions. Suggests the use of the term "creative nonfiction" as an umbrella to cover the widest range of nonfiction literary production. Argues that categorizing and compartmentalizing limits vision.

Offers a presentation of creative nonfiction addressing the author’s personal family experiences. Addresses ethical issues involved in creative nonfiction. Describes how she decided to narrate her history and contemplates in depth the artistic choices she made.

Describes the author’s personal family struggle with entering the field of English. Notes how it is becoming increasingly difficult for today’s students to be able to make choices among instrumentalist and intellectual paradigms of education and work. Concludes by voicing a hope that educators can invent new rules for "academic" writing in this new century.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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 Kenneth Burke used “The Interpretation of Dreams,” as well as other works by Sigmund Freud, as a lesson on reading, taking over the central tropes of dreamwork and making them broadly dialectical rather than strictly psychoanalytic terms. Suggests that Freud’s “tropology” of dreaming is crucial for reading Burke.

Maps out two simultaneous and mutually reinforcing phenomena: (1) the material conditions that have given rise to hierarchically arranged writing programs; and (2) the attendant cultural values that have made possible the feminization as well as the racialization of composition teaching. Argues that writing programs have emerged by way of divisions in labor, separating mental labor from mechanical labor.

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.

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.

Addresses the evolution of the most authoritative and widely used textbook in world literature courses in the United States, “The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces.” Questions if the “Norton Anthology” has provided educators who are committed to the teaching of world literature from non-Eurocentric perspectives with a useful tool, or if the anthology reproduces the canon’s ideological underpinnings.

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.

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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.

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.

Articulates “romantic intellectualism” of what graduate work in English might mean and be. Avoids giving a detailed description of a doctoral program. Intends to convey something that might best be called visioning or dreamwork, and offers it in the hope that it may be helpful to others in their individual and collective visioning and dreaming.

Challenges the recently proposed definition of the public intellectual. States that true public intellectuals (1) combine their research, teaching, and service efforts in order to address certain social issues important to community members in underserviced neighborhoods; and (2) believe in protecting scholarly autonomy through popularizing intellectual work.

Discusses the somatic mind, a permeable materiality in which mind and body resolve into a single entity which is (re)formed by the constantly shifting boundaries of discursive and corporeal intertextualities. Addresses its importance in composition studies. Critiques the poststructuralist disregard of corporeality.

Examines the simultaneous rise of rhetorical theory and continued decline of rhetorical education. Presents and discusses three definitions of “rhetoric.” Argues for the historical prominence and continued relevance of the third definition: rhetoric as the study of speaking and writing well.

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.

Compares 20 years of teaching college writing (and reading countless drafts of student papers) to an immigrant father’s working 40 years in the family store in Terre Haute, Indiana (and selling 350,000 coats).

Uses the example of service learning to examine connections between and definitions of public and private as they are deployed in writing, literacy studies, and the field of English. Argues that, done effectively, service learning fits well into an English Studies that is reconsidering its own boundaries and internal relationships.

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Discusses pedagogical strategies that encourage keener and more sensitive student reactions to the postcolonial problematics represented in two essays by Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff, essays which often provoke hostility in mainstream, White, middle-class undergraduates. Discusses ways to create a context in the literature or writing classroom that discourages a facile dismissal of Cliff.

Examines hundreds of compositions from 19th-century students at Mount Holyoke and other institutions. Finds that the first generation of women to attend United States colleges negotiated competing demands of service (to family and community) and of individual intellectual performance. Contrasts women’s compositions to men’s. Illustrates effects of gender on service, both as a concept and as an activity.

Notes that in Native American storytelling, memory is seen through an already existing story or recognized as a familiar category of experience that is widely shared. Suggests that the implications of the merging of tribal memory and personal memory are profound and that the reach of the storyteller’s memory extends beyond his own lifetime, her own experience.

Suggests that what makes Charles Johnson’s “Middle Passage” significant and eminently teachable is that it is an accessible example of “historiographic metafiction”-bestselling postmodern novels set in the past. Notes that students find the novel “easy” and enjoyable and that teaching the novel with some of its intertexts, such as H. Melville’s “Moby Dick,” can be a rewarding experience.

Proposes some ground rules for principled debating and then, from the standpoint of a leftist, evaluates two conservative critiques (Lynne Cheney’s “Telling the Truth” and John Wilson’s “The Myth of Political Correctness”) of academia in light of these ground rules.

Examines the workings of an insistent political logic in Ralph Ellison’s novel. Traces the novelistic operations, specifically the uses of symbolism, that allow Ellison to substitute rhetoric for reference, myth for history. Tests out some of the generalizing claims about Communism this technique enables Ellison to make. Argues that he chose highly anomalous details to practice typification.

Examines the roles of collaboration in the sciences and humanities by focusing on the complicated relationship between syntax and semantics. Uses scholarship on the social study of science to discuss strategies for collaboration in the humanities. Discusses why those studying language and literature are in a particularly good position to understand the nature of intellectual collaboration and its benefits.

Reviews Linda Brodkey’s prominent critique of the image of the solitary writer, and uses it as a means to examine the identity and behavior of the writer in nature. Uses various nature writers as exhibits, and speculates as to why Wendell Berry makes a distinction between “writer” and “creature.”

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Examines classroom dialog about arranged marriages in Ali Ghalem’s “A Wife for My Son” (as well as several other postcolonial, nonwestern texts) as a means of defining and sharing appropriate curricular and pedagogical modes for classroom discourse and discussion. Urges rethinking the boundaries of English studies and redefining the study of literature more broadly.