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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.

Although emotions are an important facet of teaching and learning in all classes, emotional literacy plays an especially significant role in classes that engage critically with difference. My article redefines and theorizes critical emotional literacy, proposing that we understand it as a social practice that must be developed not only by means of analytical strategies, but also by means of contemplative pedagogy. Addressing the nature of attention and the embodied experience of emotion is crucial if we are to cultivate the emotional literacy necessary for ongoing critical engagement with difference.

In three voices - one as a scholar, one as a writer, and one as an alcoholic - Hindman considers the question: in what ways can our own personal writing illuminate the theory and practice of teaching composition? Demonstrating the process of composing the self within the professional, she responds both passionately and personally to literary criticisms about recovery discourse. Her purpose is to “make writing matter” and, in doing so, to attempt to dispel the tension between competing versions of how the self is constructed. She also considers how, in and for recovery, she learned to write, and how it has affected her professional writing. This type of writing, which she has called “embodied rhetoric,” offers lessons for composing a better life.

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.

Presents a methodology based on the concept of “material rhetoric” that can help scholars avoid problems as they reclaim women’s historical texts. Defines material rhetoric and positions it theoretically in relation to other methodologies, including bibliographical studies, reception theory, and established feminist methodologies. Illustrates feminist use of material rhetoric through a study of “The Account of Hester Ann Rogers.”

Examines the pedagogy of African-American elocutionist Hallie Quinn Brown (1845–1949), professor of elocution at Wilberforce University from 1893 to 1923, as it addresses pedagogical issues still important today, such as how rhetorical instruction should address the needs of those who have a different linguistic heritage and culture.

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Few will disagree, I think, if I say that twentieth-century discussion of the lyric has often granted little recognition, and sometimes none, to the role of argumentation. Indeed, the word itself may not appear at all: we are much more likely to be told, instead, that lyric poems contain-and we should emphasize the word contain--such things as subjects, ideas, themes, or even conceptual schemes, and we are just as likely to be told that none of these things are what the lyric is really all about. Such things belong to prose, and in the lyric are merely there, contained, as useful but dispensable accessories and props; the lyric dramatizes or expresses feeling. Or rather, it bodies forth image of the poet's thought as it moves through some phase or phases of an intensely felt experience (Hardy 1-2). It is essentially dramatistic or expressive, rather than, say, discursive, argumentative, or suasory-no matter how much, in the reader's experience, it may seem to operate discursively, as an argument intending to create, intensify, or change belief. The feeling's the thing. Or so that argument goes, or has gone. This is the average mainstreammodern view of lyric, the view most likely to be taken as a self-evident given in a typical account of this most protean mode of poetry. (Barbara Hardy, for example, is able to simply declare it, as an opening premise for her book, with virtually no recognition of a possible disagreement.) I believe that few will disagree, either, if I say that strong objections to this mainstream-modern version of the lyric are and have been available. We can argue, as did Yvor Winters, that lyric poetry, or any poetry, intends not only representation or embodiment of an or state of but also judgment or evaluation of human experience, and thus is necessarily suasory and involved with argumentation, or what Winters called exposition. Or we can argue, as Gerald Graff has done, that the logos and the pathos projected by a poem are necessarily related, as premise(s) and conclusion(s), what Graff calls ground and consequent: the ground provided by what is said, by logos, makes the speaker's represented state of feeling or act of mind both convincing and intelligible-as opposed, say, to self-indulgent, incoherent, and neurotic. Graff's line of objection, then, defines the lyric once more as a form of argument. We

In his critical writing Kenneth Burke approaches texts as for dealing with situations.I In terms of his dramatistic pentad, each text may be seen as an or strategy which responds to a given scene or situation (GM, p. xv). His approach that a [text's] structure is to be described most accurately by thinking always of the [text's] function. It assumes that the [text] is designed to 'do something' for the [writer] and his readers, and that we can make the most relevant observations about its design by considering the [text] as the embodiment of this act (PLF, p. 89). But Burke's own texts have rarely been approached with Burke's critical methods. Few have been seen as strategies that respond to particular historical-cultural situations. Yet is is clear from Counterstatement (1931) through Language as Symbolic Action (1966) that Burke's texts name and strategically respond to particular historical-cultural situations. In A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) the situation so named is one dominated by language and thought which privilege the economic forces of production (RM, p. 290) and the scientific ideals of an 'impersonal' terminology (RM, p. 32). Burke's pentad clusters these emphases in modern thought and language under the term scene; that is, all favor motivational explanations based in the scene. Thus in A Rhetoric of Motives the scene Burke addresses, the situation he names, is one which emphasizes the scenic. Burke's strategic response to this situation is to restore an emphasis on act: substance, in the old philosophy, was an act; and a way of life is an acting together (RM, p. 21). In A Rhetoric of Motives Burke aims to change the reader's central emphasis from scene to act. Yet, while intending this emphasis, Burke in his writing is also aware of a tendency to slight the term, act, in the very featuring of it. For we may even favor it enough to select it as our point of departure (point of departure in the sense of an ancestral term from which all the others are derived, sharing its quality 'substantially'); but by the same token it may come to be a point of departure in the sense of the term that is 'left behind' (GM, p. 65). Burke acknowledges the difficulty of writing against his times-against the prevailing