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Arguments about literacy (and its boogeyman antonym, illiteracy) allow for, perhaps even insist upon, a certain degree of rhetorical flexibility. The idea of literacy slips into familiar commonplaces, hard to resist“or heard whether we mean them or not”in arguments with administrators, the public, our students, ourselves. Literacy’s trailing clouds include the sorts of promises that literacy scholars have learned to distrust, even as we’ve probably heard ourselves make them. None of the books in this review can sidestep these binds of literacy education, and in fact in their own ways, each of them embraces those binds as central to their analyses.

The books reviewed here share the theme of women “making it†in the world of rhetoric and composition academe. The reviewers first critically summarize each of the three collections; then narratively synthesize their personal experiences with four prominent themes across these collections: knowing, balance, mentoring, and change. This four-part woven analysis, shows and tells tales from women about what has been lurking in the academy’s closet and what still needs to change.

Through a review of syllabi of LGBT literature courses and interviews with their instructors, this article investigates the rationales behind primary text selection and how texts and course objectives inform one another in the absence of a generally established set of readings. Through such an investigation, questions of canonization emerge, thus shedding a broader light on strategies behind successful means of reading, teaching, and assessing in a course with a generally self-selected group of students.

The publication of the three works reviewed here relating to creative writing theory and pedagogy mark a point of critical mass for the field of creative writing studies that has been building for decades. This review looks at those books and discusses how they help point the way forward for the discipline.

This column reviews four books that illustrate the idea that our locations shape our meaning-making processes. She notes how each author frames the social justice issue at the heart of her or his analysis, paying close attention to how visible the Indigenous presence is as well as the settler colonialism involved in each. The resulting readings are not so much as critique of these studies, but rather show how explicit attention to the settler colonial situation might inform understandings of the relationships between rhetoric, writing, and structures of oppression in the United States, whether or not one’s work focuses primarily on Native American issues.

What does a twenty-first-century writing pedagogy look like? What principles should undergird contemporary writing pedagogy and practice? How should writing teachers today design writing courses, motivate student engagement, and promote literacy practices? Each of the five books reviewed here takes up these questions in calling for sensitivity and care in understanding students and the many ways that they are positioned in the world, for more attention to reading pedagogy in conjunction with writing, and for the continued study of transfer.

In this review, the author discusses two books that attend to the variety of ways in which the geography of a writing program affects how writing is managed and taught.

Four texts are reviewed that exemplify an important strand of writing center scholarship focused on power dynamics and identity politics in literacy teaching and learning, particularly but not exclusively within college writing centers. Each text takes up the entrenched problem of oppression and injustice toward students identified as being minority by institutional standards; each addresses possibilities for more productive, humane, and inclusive practice. Considered alongside scholarship by authors participating in this January's symposium issue and others concerned with disrupting monolingual, monocultural ideologies and institutionalized oppression, these texts add significantly to the conversation on theory and practice of critical literacy teaching and learning.

Current historical research is shifting its gaze away from metalevel studies of the field that examine the discipline’s history on the national level toward archival histories and case studies of underrepresented individuals, groups, and movements that aim to shine a light on the darkened corners of our past and provide alternative or parallel narratives of the field’s development while also hinting at the expanse of rhetorical and disciplinary history yet to be uncovered. With this observational frame in mind, the author launches into a rich and detailed review of three recent books on the history of localized populations. Each of these books adds to the field literature on the idea of microhistories; on histories of rhetoric and public voice; on the education and professional preparation of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women; and on race and racism during this same time period.

This review takes on the assumption that readers of College English believe in democratic practice and the possibility that education can play a role in supporting and cultivating those practices. The books reviewed here are a good reminder that education does not have to be focused on competition and achievement, about defining intelligence through academic aptitude, a reminder well served as the Common Core and its impending assessment shape the nature of public education and its goals.

The four titles that Adams discusses include scholarship from women's and gender studies, communication, and media studies, highlighting how the titles generate productive questions using those fields’ intersections with English studies’ own borders and emerging conversations and also allows that productive reimagining of a topic, both through its relationship with rhetoric and through an analytical melding of the familiar with the new. Adams’s review brings into focus how in representations and theories of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, “power articulates to reproductive capacities through rhetorics of risk, responsibility, fitness, and choice” (pp. 275–276) She argues that these four titles provide “numerous examples of how these terms rhetorically shape understandings of our own biology, perceptions of possibility and impossibility related to sexuality, and the ability to recognize how notions of autonomy might be enmeshed within larger contexts and systems beyond our direct control” (276).

Benson examines three books—Experimental Writing in Composition: Aesthetics and Pedagogies, Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy, and Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study—that contribute powerfully to the scholarly conversation about the changing face of composition by illustrating how the narrative of newness associated with multimodal and experimental work hides a long saga of negotiation between the traditional and the new in the field of composition.

Ferris looks at three books—Cross-Language Relations in Composition; Shaping Language Policy in the U.S.: The Role of Composition Studies; and Writing in the Devil’s Tongue: A History of English Composition in China—as they address the question of adherence to a monolingual or “standard” set of language and writing norms in composition, and consider how the answer to this question impacts our teaching.

Holdstein examines the threads that connect three seemingly disparate books in composition studies: Agents of Integration: Understanding Transfer as a Rhetorical Act by Rebecca S. Nowacek, The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics, and the University by David Bleich, and The Promise of Reason: Studies in The New Rhetoric, edited by John T. Gage.

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Books reviewed: The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers by Linda Adler-Kassner The Managerial Unconscious in the History of Composition Studies by Donna Strickland GenAdmin: Theorizing WPA Identities in the Twenty-First Century by Colin Charlton, JonikkaCharlton, Tarez Samra Graban, Kathleen J. Ryan, and Amy Ferdinandt Stolley

Books reviewed in this article: The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns by Thomas Miller; From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957–1974 by David Fleming; Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post-Civil Rights Era by Steve Lamos.

Works Reviewed: Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines. Mary Soliday. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2011. 146 pp. Print. ISBN 0-8093-3019-9.$32.00. Toward a Composition Made Whole. Jody Shipka. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2011. 173 pp. Print. ISBN 0-8229-6150-4. $24.95.

Reviewed are Writing from These Roots: Literacy in a Hmong-American Community by John M. Duffy, and Spiritual Literacy in John Wesley’s Methodism: Reading, Writing, and Speaking to Believe by Vicki Tolar Burton.

Reviewed are Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric by Paul Butler, and Performing Prose: The Study and Practice of Style in Composition by Chris Holcomb and M. Jimmie Killingsworth.

Reviewed is X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent by Scott Richard Lyons.

Reviewed are The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University by Louis Menand and No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom by Cary Nelson.

Reviewed are Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process, edited by Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan, and Working in the Archives: Practical Research Methods for Rhetoric and Composition, edited by Alexis E. Ramsey, Wendy B. Sharer, Barbara L’Eplattenier, and Lisa S. Mastrangelo.

Reviewed are Basic Writing by George Otte and Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk; Basic Writing in America: The History of Nine College Programs, edited by Nicole Pepinster Greene and Patricia J. McAlexander; Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920-1960 by Kelly Ritter; The Rhetoric of Remediation: Negotiating Entitlement and Access to Higher Education by Jane Stanley; and The Way Literacy Lives: Rhetorical Dexterity and Basic Writing Instruction by Shannon Carter.

Focusing on writing placement at a particular university, the authors analyze the limits of SAT tests as a tool in this process. They then describe the writing program’s adoption of a supplementary measure: a faculty committee’s review of essays by students who may need to be reassigned to a different writing course.

Reviewed are Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University by William Clark; Buying into English: Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World by Catherine Prendergast; How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation by Marc Bousquet; and Inside the Teaching Machine: Rhetoric and the Globalization of the U.S. Public Research University by Catherine Chaput.

Reviewed are Making Writing Matter: Composition in the Engaged University by Ann Feldman; City of Rhetoric: Revitalizing the Public Sphere in Metropolitan America by David Fleming; and Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World by Nancy Welch.

Reviewed is Teaching with Life Writing Texts, edited by Miriam Fuchs and Craig Howes.

Reviewed is Save the World on Your Own Time by Stanley Fish.