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This article explores how scholarship informed by queer theory can be brought to bear on social class within the academy in order to open spaces for thinking about our professional ethos in English studies. I offer the term queerly classed faculty to accentuate the usefulness of bringing queer theory into conversation with questions of class, as well as to point to the strange or perverse sense of displacement that many faculty experience in relation to professional normalization. Through a brief analysis of queerly classed ruptures in normativity that tend to coalesce around questions of propriety and civility, I illustrate how we might use shame to expand and open the normative horizon of our collective professional subjectivity and ethos in English studies. Ultimately, I argue that the relational awareness and tension of ambivalence that shame produces for many queerly classed faculty offers an ethical calling, not to dispel the shame that is born of an interest in identification, but instead to use the embodied experience of shame to create a heightened sensitivity to our relation to self and others within our professional lives, such that we might find common ground among our differences.

In 1837, Margaret Prior became the first female missionary for the American Female Moral Reform Society. She traveled throughout the poorest neighborhoods in New York City’ entering barrooms, brothels, and sickrooms. Based on an analysis of Prior’s missionary reports, published in the society’s periodical and included in her memoir, this essay shows how Prior exerted an ethos of presence. Her willingness to traverse the seediest sections of the city, call on any person, and address any need exerted a powerful ethos in the communities she served and among the audiences who read and heard about her efforts.

The history of American imperialism, as well as China’s strong presence on the contemporary global scene, should encourage American scholars of rhetoric to look beyond the nation-state and study other rhetorical traditions such as Chinese practices of argument. A debate during the Western Han dynasty over the country’s economic policies illustrates how official-orators discursively engaged one another while representing various philosophical orientations. This debate also reminds us of how important the values of humanity, empathy, and responsibility should be in contemporary rhetorical education.

The authors describe their individual and collective experiences reconstructing their New Orleans-based university composition program in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. They emphasize how the concept of floating foundations helps account for changes in their students’ interests, and they suggest that this idea is applicable to the work of writing instructors in general.

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.

In the critically acclaimed movie 8-Mile, Future, a host for the rap battles held in a Detroit neighborhood, proffers the above encouragement to his charge, an aspiring white rapper, played by recording sensation Eminem. Aside from the connections, real and imagined, between the emergence of Bunny-Rab bit, the character Eminem portrays, and his actual rise in the hip-hop community, the movie evokes a number of interesting quandaries about discursive strategies? voices historically ascribed to and inscribed by African Americans. Facets of Eminem's language appear to resonate with that of African American rappers, not to mention the larger oral tradition from which hip-hop discourse derives, though his existen tial experience surrounding that language cannot. Moreover, rappers speak of neigh borhoods plagued by economic disenfranchisement, disenfranchisement that some whites, like Eminem, have experienced as well. Still, Future's exhortation raises at least two questions: can a language performer (irrespective of genre) of one race truly participate in the discursive community of another? Given the material op pression that has accompanied the socially constructed denigration of African phe notypic features, can the sound of blackness be ultimately divorced from the sight of blackness?1

The author uses a discussion of Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven to argue that cross-racial voicing on the part of white writers may in fact express an attempt to acknowledge and perhaps explore the rhetorical efficacy of a black ethos. At the same time, the author suggests that English studies scholars of all races need to create forums where cross-racial voicing can be explored, that white English professors must continue to interrogate hegemonic attempts to control and colonize African American discourse, and that teachers should design assignments that help students gain insights into the historical and contemporary struggles blacks face to characterize their own discursive practices.

The author takes us back through his own and his family’s stories and histories to suggest that while academic discourse can be cognitively powerful it needs to be supplemented by memory and story, in our classrooms and in our scholarship. Memoria, mother of the muses, complements academic discourse’s strengths in logos and in ethos with pathos, providing an essential element in the rhetorical triangle, and, crucially, validating the experiences of people of color that might otherwise be silenced.

Notes that educators must think about the possibilities for using autobiographical narrative ethically and effectively in academic writing and research, and they need to ask how the personal affects writing that is less personal. Considers how regardless of the stance toward the personal, no one can be an informed writer or reader without considering how subjectivity informs ways of knowing.

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