The Caribbean is a haunted place, and because the people themselves are haunted. To be haunted in the sense is to be moved in a way that may defy easy identification or logical explanation. Of course, the phenomenon of being haunted is not exclusive to Caribbean folk but to marginalized peoples wherever they lose or find themselves, as ideological contortions, jargonistic somersaults, theoretical misdirections, and methodological missteps often signal the existence of a common-and intensely human-situation: that we may well be driven or inspired to embark on a given project, and that we are often at odds in our attempts to precisely identify the source of that drive, the inspiration that may have caused it. Here, Browne talks about the rhetorical significance of Caribbean tradition.

The genre of the study-abroad blog prompts students who are studying abroad to identify with marginalized populations they encounter during the travel experience, a practice that is particularly exigent amid the increasing commercialization of the studyabroad industry. To understand the conventions and ethical implications of the genre, the author examines an advice column on blogging abroad and students' reflections on their own writing from a recent studyabroad course. The blog conventions show that students are encouraged to use the misfortune of others to affirm their own privilege, while the interviews suggest that students need more support in responding to the complex cultural conditions of study abroad. To challenge the conventions of the studyabroad blog and ultimately the ideologies that contribute to the genre, faculty members leading students abroad should undertake pedagogical practices that encourage “empathic unsettlement. Copyright © 2018 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

This article explores the performance of Appalachian identity via the use of tellable narratives by students in two composition classrooms that were the focus of an ethnographic case study. Utilizing examples gleaned from interviews, classroom observations, and student writing, I illustrate how the students in my study demonstrated narrative complexity as they skillfully and creatively mediated the rhetorical situations they faced, crafting tellable and untellable narratives of Appalachian identity in response to their audience’s needs.

What dynamics govern the "reclamation" of contested terms? Applying Burke's notion of terministic screens illuminates the reclamation efforts surrounding contested—terms "Black" and "queer," both historically derogatory (and therefore discouraged) and now broadly reclaimed (and acceptable). In such reclamations, redemptive in—nature, the derogatory term is portrayed not as false but as misunderstood. But the reclamation movements surrounding "nigger" and "faggot" have been restricted,—i.e., acceptable only for in-group use (and mockingly directing attention to their derogatory history). Various reclamation narratives challenge the semantic binary—of derogation and reclamation: they indicate not "successes" or "failures" but different styles of reclamation.

The gendered rhetorical constraints imposed on female writers in mid-nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals are challenged by the representations of letter writing in Susan Warner’s  The Wide, Wide World and Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter, popular mid-century novels. By investigating imaginative literature by women as a site of women’s rhetoric, feminist historians of rhetoric can recognize that the battlefield for expanding women’s rhetorical agency in the mid-nineteenth century is not primarily located at the division between domestic and public realms—the site emphasized in current histories of women’s rhetoric—but is interior, where letter-writing rhetorics seek to police habits of mind.

Translingual approaches to composition promise to nudge the field fully away from outdated concepts of linguistic diversity, replacing judgments of correctness and assumptions—about discrete languages with analyses of local, situational negotiations and pragmatic competence. Yet in fully displacing the monolingual “native speaker” with the translingual—composer, the approach replaces one linguistic hero with another—a fully competent “user” who shuttles between languages. This article seeks to extend translingualism’s—analysis of (metaphorical) language ecologies into the material surroundings of language contact situations. Drawing on scholarship on affect, vital materialism, and material—rhetorics, it suggests an empirical reorientation that diffuses attention beyond human language-using rhetors in order to account for shared rhetorical agency.

This essay urges scholars and teachers interested in the rhetorical agency of economically disenfranchised groups to expand their field of vision beyond the organized labor movement. The author discusses the Moonlight Schools, founded in Kentucky in 1911 by Cora Wilson Stewart, as a site for investigating alternative forms of solidarity. More particularly, she argues that Appalachian women used the literacy skills they developed under Stewart’s tutelage to support their own long-standing practices of neighborliness. By thus looking beyond strikes, walkouts, and other dramatic rhetorical moments from the labor movement, this essay hopes to begin building a more nuanced understanding of how people with limited economic resources gain purchase in the world through words.

“Sinners Welcome” explores the relationship between current community partnership models and the political rhetoric that often surrounds them. Taking up the frequent invocation of Cornel West’s “prophetic pragmatism” in such partnerships, this article investigates what it might mean to understand this term as a call to work for actual systemic justice for those most oppressed by the current political moment. To make this concrete, the article discusses a community partnership project that resulted in an activist organization being created by local residents in response to a large-scale redevelopment effort in the neighborhood. Once created, this organization became the site of a concerted countereffort to defund and discredit such partnership work. It is this tension between community partnerships and activism, between prophetic pragmatism’s theoretical goals and its actual practice, that represents a fundamental choice within English studies. Ultimately, the article poses the question of how far our field is willing to go in the name of a “transformative politics.”

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.

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.

When, why, and how do college students come to value their writing as intellectual property? How do their conceptions of intellectual property reflect broader understandings and personal engagements with concepts of authorship, collaboration, identification, and capital? We address these questions based on findings from the Stanford Study of Writing, a five-year longitudinal cohort study that examined students’ writing, writing development, and attitudes toward writing throughout their college years and one year beyond. Drawing in particular from interview data, we trace relationships between students’ complex and creative negotiations with intellectual property and shaping tensions within the academy, arguing for renewed pedagogical approaches that affirm students’ writerly agency as consumers and producers of intellectual property.

This article excavates how style in writing was represented and taught in the under-investigated mid-twentieth century. I trace four editions of the textbook Modern Rhetoric (1949–1979), authored by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren; I detail how the book was surprisingly innovative for the time, despite its eventual re-entrenchment to a more conservative approach. I argue that the teaching of style serves as a marker of the tensions between disciplines and pedagogical approaches, changing views of students, and competing cultural demands.

The theory of bullshit put forth by philosopher Harry Frankfurt needs to be critiqued from the perspective of rhetorical theory, which can take into account how the identification of bullshit involves analyzing speaker, content, and audience as well as the interactions of these elements. More specifically, bullshit can be seen as an indifferent tampering with conventions of politeness, which makes it the antithesis of the kind of rhetoric we should teach.

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.

Identifying the specific complexities and historical context of post-Mao Chinese literary women’s rhetoric, along with ways they have been misread, the author argues in general that Western feminist critics need to be cautious about applying their concepts to non-Western women’s literature.

Teaching postcolonial literature to American college students involves taking them through a dialectical process of thinking about identification. In the first stage, students are encouraged to note similarities between their own lives and those of the work’s characters. With the second step, students examine how the work’s cultural and historical context makes the characters different from them in key ways. Finally, students use the differences that they have found in order to reflect on aspects of their own situations from a new angle. The author demonstrates this process through a discussion of her experiences teaching Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1988 novel Nervous Conditions.

Traditionally, we English faculty have warned our students against simply identifying with a literary work’s characters. For us, such attachments constitute “reading badly.” But we engage in identifications, too, including ones with the work’s author. A consideration of critical responses to “Benito Cereno” and Uncle Tom’s Cabin enables us to see how our own identifications often operate. In our teaching of reading, we should openly acknowledge our own commitments and help our students negotiate them.

Reviewed are Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism, by Sharon Crowley, and Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, by Krista Ratcliffe.

Reviewed are Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media, edited by Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick; Defining Visual Rhetorics, edited by Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers; The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film, edited by David Blakesley; and Tuned In: Television and the Teaching of Writing, by Bronwyn T. Williams.

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.

Contextualizes the rhetorical archive and moves beyond composition to the traditions of civic discourse, classical rhetorical theory, and moral philosophy. Wonders what kind of archive of actual historical practices would enable rhetoricians to confirm or qualify the existence of a genuine tradition of civic discourse.

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.

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Richards characterized in 1936 as dreariest and least profitable part of the waste that the unfortunate travel through in Freshman English (3) to pluralistic, multidimensional, architectonic discipline in our time. Theresa Enos and Stuart C. Brown in their introduction to Defining the New Rhetorics point out, for instance, that nothing short of the collective effort of multitude of perspectives would enable an encompassing view of and its place in the (vii). And as John Bender and David E. Wellbery observe in The Ends of Rhetoric, contemporary rhetorical inquiry occurs in an matrix that touches on all major academic fields (viii); as result, it has gained an irreducibly multidisciplinary character (38). Less talked about, yet equally important to putting contemporary redefinition of the classical art in perspective, is the fact that the transformation takes place not so much in congenial interdisciplinary matrix as in what Bakhtin terms verbal-ideological world-a world where the centrifugal and the centripetal forces carry on their uninterrupted work alongside each other (272), the ideal of interdisciplinarity inevitably comes into conflict with the imperatives of disciplinary politics, and the enthusiasm to open up is always conditioned by an urge to close down. Thus in responding to rhetoric becoming the central paradigmatic, epistemic activity, Derrida speaks out in Journal of Advanced Composition interview against what he calls rhetoricism or a way of giving all the power, thinking that everything depends on rhetoric. Rhetoric, he maintains, should stay within its traditional limits of verbality, formality, figures of speech (15).

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It has been twenty years since Richard Young, Alton Becker and Kenneth Pike brought out their challenging and revolutionary book, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. Though cast in the mold of a rhetorical handbook, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change (like many of the best rhetorical handbooks, including Aristotle's Rhetoric) attempted to do more than relay the accumulated rhetorical wisdom of its age in a predigested form suitable for students. It was an attempt to synthesize a complete rhetorical system, a system that in some ways built on and in some ways departed from the classical model. Arguing that Profound changes are taking place in the system of Western values that has for centuries guided conduct (8), Young, Becker and Pike wanted to rethink rhetoric from its foundations, using concepts borrowed from problem-solving theory, game theory, dialogic communication, linguistics, and Carl Rogers' nondirective therapy. Out of these materials they created a rhetoric that they claimed offered new goals, new ways of creating ideas, and new ways of managing the rhetor-audience relationship. I would like to focus primarily on Young, Becker and Pike's use of principles. I see this as their most interesting, possibly most enduring, and certainly most controversial contribution to modern rhetoric, a contribution that escapes the bounds of the eighteen pages in which they explicitly discuss Rogers and subtly but pervasively dominates the entire work. The propriety and the pedagogical utility of Young, Becker and Pike's Rogerian rhetoric has been debated before, by Andrea Lunsford, Diane C. Mader, and Lisa Ede among others. This debate has centered chiefly on two questions: whether rhetoric as developed by Young, Becker and Pike is genuinely different from Aristotelian rhetoric and on whether it is fair to its main source, therapy. This debate is far from trivial and it is far from closed; this article to some extent will continue it. But it is time to step back and, from our twenty-year vantage point, ask some larger questions that enclose and put into perspective these more local questions of fairness to sources. To do so, let us look at Young, Becker and Pike's version of rhetoric both in its historical context and in the context of the larger rhetorical sys-

If is one thing contemporary observers of American literary studies agree upon, it is New must finally be transcended. William Cain, for example, protests New Critics' identification of with close reading of classic literary texts. It is not 'close reading' is itself misconceived, he argues, rather case for it has always been made at expense of other important things. Because New Critics won their case so convincingly, these other things have long been excluded from literary establishment. A list of costs resulting from institutionalization of New in 1950s, according to Cain, would include the rejection of other methods and other kinds of texts; misguided attempt to define (and thus defend) teaching of literature as, above all, 'close reading'; skepticism shown towards literary theory; and refusal to see other disciplines as having relevance for 'literary' criticism (New Criticism 1111-12). Criticism, in short, has become formalistic, to use an old critical buzz-word. Even deconstruction, as Cain correctly observes, is more an intensified continuation of tradition of formalistic close reading than a new, expansive kind of Fortunately, says Cain, there have been signs in recent years New Critical reign is at last coming to an end. The most important of these signs is the revival of 'history' as an instrument for criticism. This revival is result of work of certain critics and theorists-Cain mentions Foucault, Said, and Jameson-who have shown that 'history' does not have to imply-as it did for scholars New Critics attacked in 1930s-a narrow and naive review of sources, backgrounds, and influences. Rather, history now means the formation of an archive, building up of a rich, detailed, and complex discursive field. The ground for criticism, from this point of view, is not classic literary text, but inter-textual configurations and arrangements; 'criticism' thus entails study of power, political uses of language, and orders of discourse (New Criticism 1116-17). This reconstitution of ground for will produce, presumably, an analogous transformation of practice of close reading and expand domain of to include methods, texts, and disciplines suppressed by New Criticism. These developments, needless to say, win Cain's seal of approval.

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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

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PROFESSOR ARNETT IS ADDRESSING taxonomists in entomology, no doubt a rather peripheral body of specialists, at least in the vision of most English teachers. But his point holds for any profession that makes and perpetuates formal classifications. What specialists forget is that classifications, built by specialists, should serve nonspecialists. Yet in all disciplines the formal classification often does little more than befuddle. Since my aim here is precisely to suggest a classification fit for the novice writer, I think it is essential first to ask what has gone wrong when this particular mode of knowledge-a more central one can hardly be conceived-proves difficult for laymen to assimilate. Such a preliminary inquiry, although perforce brief, at least will show faults I have tried to avoid in building a classification of discourse that beginning writers can both understand readily and use easily. It may help to remain for a moment with the biological taxonomy. Three centuries have so refined this classificatory procedure that the problem of which Professor Arnett speaks, this failure of communication between builder and user, stands out clearly. Consider those taxonomic keys that biologists construct for identification of specimens, for instance those in Julian A. Steyermark's Flora of Missouri or Melville Hatch's Beetles of the Pacific Northwest. Professor Arnett's point is that amateurs (and not a few professional biologists) find these keys impossible to use. The chief obstacle is not hard to find. Traditionally, these keys are constructed to follow evolutionary, genetic relationships as closely as possible. The result is an analytical description of a whole field, very much like a genealogical tree. The farmer, however, who rashly comes to these keys with specimen in hand, cares little

IN The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn elaborates the concept of the a comprehensive theoretical model that governs both the view of reality accepted by an intellectual community and the practice of that community's discipline. This concept has increasing interest for English studies because new demands on our composition courses, along with new developments in literary theory, have contributed to a hot debate over the premises of our discipline. Maxine Hairston, for one, has explained in an address to the 1978 convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication that we should understand this debate as the sort of profound revolution in accepted thinking that accompanies a new paradigm, rather than as an unrelated group of local disagreements over critical tastes and pedagogical methods. Professor Hairston wants to dignify our debate as a debate because she fears, with good reason, that its beginnings in literary theory and composition pedagogy have allowxved too many practitioners in English studies to regard it as tangential to their main business. Therefore, Hairston emphasizes the comprehensive nature of the as Kuhn explains it. Having characterized our situation as a debate, however, Hairston goes on to support her own candidate for our new by an appeal to evidence. But it is Kuhn's most striking point that a determines the identification and interpretation of empirical in a given discipline. Empirical makes sense only when considered in light of a paradigm; therefore, evidence cannot be imported to establish a above debate. Hairston and others (Janet Emig and E. D. Hirsch, for example) have sought, however, to establish a based on such evidence, under the misapprehension that only a so established can raise English studies to the status of a truly rigorous discipline. On the contrary, Kuhn argues that a is established, even in the natural sciences, not because of compelling evidence, but because of a rhetorical process that delimits the shared language of the intellectual community governed by the paradigm. Indeed, he suggests that he has derived his concept of paradigm for the sciences from a study of the theoretical models that govern the humanistic disciplines. In following Kuhn, we should not be misled into a scientistic faith in evidence as compelling. Instead, the special province of our new may be indicated in his analysis of the ways in which any is constituted by language.

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