Supporting the professional development of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) is a strategic necessity for both English studies and higher education. At many academic institutions, GTAs represent a significant proportion of instructional staff for first-year composition courses (Young and Bippus 116). These courses serve a crucial institutional mission as an academic entry point for the majority of undergraduate students and have been closely linked with student retention, graduation rates, and academic performance (Garrett, Bridgewater, and Feinstein; Holmes and Busser). Based on a recent national study, Amy Cicchino found most rhetoric and composition programs offer intensive, but condensed, GTA training programs that typically include a preservice orientation, semester-long teaching proseminar, and peer or faculty mentorship (93). Yet, time is a significant constraint—most programs take place over a single semester or academic year and end just as GTAs gain enough teaching experience and confidence to become more interested in composition theory and professional development (Obermark, Brewer, and Halasek; Reid).

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 article examines how creative writing pedagogy and composition pedagogy can be put into productive conversation by using expressivism and social constructionism as a shared frequency, allowing for a deepening of the pedagogical options available to teachers. The end result of this analysis is a proposal for a dual course pairing of composition and creative writing. Within this proposed arrangement, creative writing, on the one hand, would emphasize expressivist pedagogies that grant students centrality in the classroom while still exploring the ideological implications of the writing act. Composition, on the other hand, would focus on scholarship, research, and theory, while still employing creative writing activities that keep student writers from feeling utterly marginalized.

This article examines the limitations of social constructionist theory that conflates collaboration with “conversation,” an idea that not only informs how many writing scholars understand the concept of collaboration itself, but one that also allows writing theorists to argue that all writing is inherently collaborative. After briefly tracing the history of this social turn collaboration theory, the article offers an object-oriented definition of collaboration to initiate a rhetorical framework for understanding what collaborators actually do with their discourse, especially when they compose texts. Following a discussion of Donald Davidson’s concept of triangulation and its relevance for understanding the discursive work of collaboration, the article concludes with a consideration of how this revised approach to collaborative composition reflects the goals of postprocess theory, including the habits of mind discussed in the Framework for Success in Post-Secondary Writing.

This article reconstructs a writing theory on which Fred Newton Scott and John Dewey collaborated in the 1890s. Drawing on technology theorists’ discussions of “technological determinism,” this article critiques the deterministic aspects of Scott’s and Dewey’s thinking, and it suggests that their errors can illuminate determinism’s dangers for contemporary writing theory. The article also discusses some questions that Scott’s and Dewey’s theory raise for study of their later ideas.

The author reports on and analyzes the inclusion of parody in her sequence of assignments for a graduate composition theory seminar. She contends that having students write parodies of particular theorists and theoretical camps enables them to gain critical leverage that they might not otherwise obtain on a field (in this case, composition studies).

Through an examination of the work of the nineteenth-century American rhetorician Henry Noble Day the author suggests that the causal relationship usually identified between economic formations and genres such as exposition is not a purely one-way process. Day’s rhetorics, he argues, were not only shaped by the economies of Taylorism but also were themselves engaged in a sociohistorical process of class formation, suggesting that such a study of the connections among managerialism, current-traditional rhetoric, and class formation raises important questions for our own work today.

m ecently reprinted in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, David Bartholomae's the University is now a recognized classic in the field of composition theory. I admired the article, when I first read it over twenty years ago, as a telling criticism of writing as process. I also found it vexing, and still do. I use my vexation with Inventing as a catalyst for rumination on my social trajectory. My vexation is intimately related my passage from the working the middle class. I read Inventing as the negation both of my own educational experience as a member of the working class and of the pedagogy I employ as a teacher of writing with middle-class students. It is a tribute the power of Inventing, now seen as an early example of social constructionism, that I am not the only person more recently vexed by it. Thomas Newkirk and Nancy Welch are also. I use their particular responses Inventing as a way define my own. Newkirk points more my problem with the implications of Inventing for my view of education: making the move into university discourse is not simply a matter of inventing but also of uprooting. Welch points more my problem with Inventing as implying a narrative of academic socialization distinctly different from the socializing process I underwent. At the core of Inventing is Bartholomae's analysis of the function of the commonplace in student writing. He illustrates his claims through reference short student writings produced in response a prompt on creativity. One student writes, Creativity me, means being free express yourself in a way that is unique you (148). Bartholomae comments that with his use of to me the student appropriates a commonplace as his own. Further, this act of appropriation constitutes his as a writer (149). Bartholomae argues that one's authority as an academic

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.

Preview this article: Politics and Ordinary Language: A Defense of Expressivist Rhetorics, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/58/4/collegeenglish9047-1.gif

... the fact that their philosophical procedures are designed bring us a consciousness of the words we must have, and hence of the lives we must have, represents for me a recognizable version of the wish to establish the truth of this world. But then wherever there really is a love of wisdom-or call it the passion for truth-it is inherently, if usually ineffectively, revolutionary; because it is the same as hatred of the falseness in one's character and of the needless and unnatural promises in one's institutions. Stanley Cavell, An Audience for Philosophy

Preview this article: Community in the Expressivist Classroom: Juggling Liberal and Communitarian Visions, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/57/1/collegeenglish9149-1.gif

under attack, and social constructionism-the view that good writers must master the accepted practices of a discourse community-was widely adopted as an alternative. The purpose of this article is to defend expressivism against this attack, particularly against two charges. First, responding to the charge that expressivism, following the romantics, is tied to the ideal of the isolated writer, Steve Fishman argues on historical grounds that it was the social reform dimension of German romanticism that inspired expressivism. Second, Lucille McCarthy responds to the charge that expressivism disempowers students because it does not help them learn disciplinary and professional languages. She presents Fishman's class as one which is committed both to the mastery of philosophic method and to the development of student voices, committed, that is, to achieving social constructionist goals within an expressivist environment. Part I presents a theoretical perspective on expressivism; Part II shows the practical implementation of that theory in the classroom.

Preview this article: Is Expressivism Dead?, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/54/6/collegeenglish9364-1.gif

In Philosophy in a New Key Susanne Langer writes of the great generative ideas that periodically arise to transform our intellectual enterprises by changing the very terms in which we frame our questions and conceive our purposes. When one of these concepts bursts into consciousness, we cannot at first view it critically, because it is the nature of a key change to possess us with its compelling new vision of the world. For some time afterwards we are absorbed in exploiting the energizing, fertilizing power of the new idea, which seems limitless in its implications and applications. Only later, as a paradigm matures, can we begin to refine and correct its key concept and to achieve the critical distance necessary to recognize its bounds. We are approaching this moment in composition, which has taken process as its generative theme for over a decade. By keying composition studies to writers' thought processes and the relations between cognition and language, this theme has restored to the field what was lost with the decline of rhetoric: a genuinely rich, humanly significant, and inexhaustible object of inquiry. In the next stage of our development as a discipline, we need to take up a more critical attitude toward process theory, to probe its limits and to articulate and address some of the conceptual problems it leaves unresolved. I would like to make a contribution to that work in this essay. My starting point is the difficulty of handling textual issues-for example, matters of style or discourse form-within the process framework. That framework has no principled way to account for the role of texts in discourse events because it was constituted initially by a contrastive opposition between composing (dynamic process) and texts (inert product). Texts were therefore rejected as proper objects of inquiry in composition. I suggest we might resolve this problem and work toward a more comprehensive theory of discourse by developing concepts on the principle of integrating text and process at all levels of analysis.

In 1977 Donald Stewart startled his audience at the National Council of Teachers of English Convention by giving them a test.1 Not at all to his surprise, Professor Stewart found that although the teachers assembled devoted forty-five percent of their working time to teaching composition, hardly any of them recognized the names of twenty prominent rhetoricians or titles of works by those rhetoricians. Professor Stewart did not include Alexander Bain on his list, but had he done so very few of the writing teachers in his audience would have heard of Bain. Almost certainly, none would have read his books on composition and rhetoric. That such should be the case seems remarkable, for a great deal of what has been taught in traditional composition courses derives directly or indirectly from Bain's work. In an historical study of the paragraph written at the end of the nineteenth century, Edwin Lewis describes Bain's influence as formative. Indeed, Lewis claims that Bain's analysis of the paragraph was presented and defended with the same acuteness and grasp that made him perhaps the ablest writer on rhetoric since Aristotle.2 Bain's stock, however, has plunged since Lewis wrote those words. The revival of interest in rhetoric occurring during the last three decades has led us to call into question what Richard Young calls the current-traditional in the teaching of composition.3 For those challenging this paradigm and attempting to improve or replace it, Bain has become a popular whipping boy, identified with a rigidly prescriptive, product-centered system. Exactly who was Alexander Bain, and has his influence on our discipline been, on the whole, salutary or detrimental? When Bain died at the age of eighty-six in 1903, major newspapers throughout Britain and North America carried the news. The headline in the New York