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Drawing from recent work in the areas of economics and sociology, this article applies theories of precarity and the precariat, terms that denote the marginalized status of contingent workers, to the composition classroom. Reviewing the economic and social conditions precipitating workforce casualization, the article argues that theories of precarity support the efforts of scholars in composition studies thinking beyond the concept of social class and toward models of solidarity. Building upon the work of these scholars, the article advocates attention to the shared precarity of students and proposes methods of enhancing solidarity at the university.

At a historical moment when both violence and its mass mediation proliferate, this essay takes as its exigence the reinforcing and troubling relationships uniting violence, image, and vision. It offers rhetorical looking as a pedagogical strategy designed to undermine violence through visual engagement, and it focuses on the atrocity image—a photographic depiction of human-on-human violence—as both a site of violence and a site for intervening in violence. Comprising four interlocking and reciprocal tactics that operate nonlinearly, rhetorical looking performs slow looking, a mode of perception that moves beyond reception and critique to attend to a photograph’s image content and to the perceptual habits by which that content is evoked. By reflecting on its own processes—revealing agency and answerability in looking—rhetorically looking potentially fosters actions that respond to rather than dismiss violence.

Complexity leadership theory provides a perspective on leadership that values, rather than avoids, the realities of a complex environment. As we are now fully part of an age of networks, facilitating leadership toward collective action means embracing a distributed model reliant on multiple modes of communication distributed over multiple nodes in complex networks. A complexity theory of leadership that is practiced within the context of multimodal authorship favors collective action over individual action, collaboration over centralization, and connectivity over isolation. It is in the power of multiple networks interacting and becoming a complex adaptive system that collective action leads to positive change.

This article foregrounds story as a rhetorical mode of Indigenous leadership to argue for the value of local scholars working in place. Utilizing recent scholarship in Native rhetorics, educational leadership, decolonial theory, I offer my own experience as a Cherokee citizen and Indigenous researcher to illustrate the value of local cultural knowledge to the field and the academy. I suggest the reconsideration of cosmopolitan values and institutional practices that alienate Indigenous scholars from their communities.

In the early twentieth century, students produced and used a variety of texts to commemorate their school experiences and foster a sense of community among themselves. Through the compositional practices and values associated with these texts“particularly those of school literary annuals and memory books”the genre of the modern school yearbook emerged. This article draws on primary sources to trace the emergence of the yearbook as a form and practice at one Louisville high school for girls, where yearbooks both reflected and shaped the experience of high school for students who manifest complex genre knowledge and identity work in their compilations and inscriptions.

Transfer student writers, who comprise more than one-third of all college students, are simultaneously experienced writers and first-year students at their new institutions. Despite their complicated positions, these students have received very little attention from composition specialists. This article responds to the paucity of attention to transfer student writers by reporting on a multiyear study that alternated between investigations of the experiences of these students and programmatic changes designed to address their expressed needs and concerns. The guiding principle of this work, and of the advice offered to colleagues interested in supporting transfer student writers on their own campuses, is a combination of institutional and student changes or mutual adjustments.

Grounded in a multimodal turn in composition studies, this article reports findings from a quantitative taxonomy analysis of four visual rhetoric and multimodal composition textbooks. This analysis reveals that while theories privilege the production of visual and multimodal compositions, the practices encapsulated in these textbooks promote the consumption of such compositions more so than production. As a result, instructors will have to be mindful about their uptake of visual and multimodal textbooks if they want to teach in ways that are theoretically grounded and rhetorically rich.

The author proposes a concept of ethics for the writing course, one derived from a moral theory that is both old and new and one that engages us when we teach such practices as making claims, providing evidence, and choosing metaphors in corollary discussions of honesty, accountability, generosity, intellectual courage, and other qualities. These and similar qualities are what Aristotle called “virtues,” and they are the subject of that branch of moral philosophy known as “virtue ethics” today. While the word virtue may sound strange to us today, Duffy argues that the tradition of the virtues has much to offer teachers and students and can clarify what it means, in an ethical sense, to be a “good writer” in a skeptical, postmodern moment.

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 essay, I argue that contemporary efforts to advocate for job security for teaching-track faculty in English studies, especially in composition, can be enhanced by identifying and reconfiguring two types of negative affects: those circulating around the “affective labor” required to teach writing and those circulating around the educational spaces in which such labor typically occurs. After defining my terms, I begin analyzing the impact of these two types of negative affect on calls for teaching-track job security. I then use Grego and Thompson’s “studio” model of basic writing as an example of teaching work that can be used to generate and circulate positive affects regarding the “affective-labor-in-space” performed by writing teachers. Finally, I articulate three premises designed to help articulate and emplace positive affects regarding teaching-track composition work such that possibilities for job security are enhanced.

This essay argues for approaches to composing that underscore the translingual and multimodal (or transmodal) character of texts and communicative practices. It maintains that learning about and working with different language varieties, cultural conventions, modes, and communicative technologies (digital as well as analog) helps to highlight processes of making, engaging, remixing, and transforming which, in turn, provide markedly different, and greatly enriched, points of entry for experiencing and appreciating the dynamic, highly distributed, translingual, multimodal, and embodied aspects of all communicative practice.

Emancipatory projects that have sought to change paradigms of knowledge making in English studies have fallen short of addressing the imperialist underpinnings of modernist thought. This essay defines three key aspects of translingual approaches to composition and rhetoric (i.e., languaging, translating, and dwelling in borders) that can potentially involve scholars and students in meaning making that attempts to level linguistic and knowledge hierarchies that always index imperialist legacies of thought and deed.

This essay examines what a translingual orientation offers to the study and teaching of genre, in particular what we gain when we think of genre difference not as a deviation from a patterned norm but rather as the norm of all genre performance. A translingual perspective draws our attention to genre uptake as a site of transaction where memory, language, and other semiotic resources, genre knowledge, and meanings are translated and negotiated across genres, modalities, and contexts. Focusing on genre uptake performances shifts attention from genre conventions to the interplays between genres where agency is in constant play.

While “expertise” has been both an implicit and explicit focal point of composition, our most familiar models of expertise running along a spectrum from novice to expert may not allow for a nuanced deployment of tacit knowledge. Without dismissing any of the field's important work on expertise, therefore, I introduce the concept of para-expertise: the experiential, embodied, and tacit knowledge that does not translate into the vocabulary or skills of disciplinary expertise. This concept may help to resituate how we conceptualize, teach, and use notions of expertise in the classroom, since it can teach nonexperts to pursue rhetorical action through strategic expertise alliances without overstepping the very real limitations of nonexpertise.

This article uses data from a study of college students’ digital reading and writing to examine the influence of interface on literacy activity within participatory online spaces. While most existing work treats activity within these spaces largely as a function of individual interest in a space’s content, students’ firsthand accounts suggest that interface features and design play a significant role as well, particularly as students transition from one form of engagement or activity to another. Using Teena Carnegie’s framing of the interface as digital exordium, the author argues that, since participatory interfaces and the composition classroom share several central goals, students’ experiences with interface offer important lessons for translating that engagement to an academic setting.

Faced with the need to educate women collectively about politics and government, Jane Croly established the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) in 1890. Based on archival documents from the GFWC, this article seeks to address the following research questions: What do the patriotic pageants sponsored by the GFWC illustrate about civic education in the Americanization era? What can we learn about civic education and the use of particular rhetorical forms from twentieth-century pageants and organizations such as the GFWC? By exploring the organization’s contribution to civic education alongside other pageants in the same era, it is possible to better contextualize the competing histories of civic education for ourselves and our students. This article also focuses on the patriotic pageants that club women used to develop a model of social change rooted in education, which had contradictory results. The GFWC both supported and resisted whiteness as the position of authority in its promotion of pageants. Embracing the contradictions of pageants and their role in civic education in the Americanization era allows for a more nuanced and accurate picture of the history of civic education.

Given the ubiquity of images and, implicitly, the habits of looking that influence the production of those images for both representation and communication, English studies requires a theory of Design that better accounts for dominant perceptual habits that function both to constrain acts of choice making and to restrict the repertoire of available resources. This article contributes to that agenda by focusing on one perceptual habit: the racialized gaze, a dominant cultural habit for perceiving race-related visual phenomena. Employing a fascinating take on the political cartoons of the nineteenth-century artist Thomas Nast as “racialized design,” Hum uses this work to complicate the idea of both design and gaze for students and teachers of visual rhetoric today. Specifically, she argues, among other points, that “the racialized gaze as Design provides a valuable theoretical framework for visual rhetoric, exegesis, and cultural analysis by directing our attention to how designers may unwittingly sustain practices of racialization and perpetuate racially based sociocultural exclusions”

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.

This essay reimagines the way that listening is taught in the multimodal composition classroom. In contrast to listening to sonic content for meaning, the listening pedagogy I introduce is based on my concept of multimodal listening—a practice that involves attending to the sensory, material, and contextual aspects that comprise and shape a sonic event. I argue that cultivating multimodal listening practices will enable students to become more savvy consumers and producers of sound in the composition classroom and in their everyday lives.

This history explores the early growth of composition faculty between 1960 and 1990, arguing that composition has historically functioned as a site of flexible expertise. As archives of the Modern Language Association’s Job Information List attest, early job advertisements for composition “specialists” defined the work of composition in terms antithetical to specialization, expecting a compositionist to perform a variety of administrative work and to teach comfortably in multiple areas. The flexible identity of the field’s faculty aided its growth during a period when tenure-track faculty waned; composition thrived because faculty could serve multiple institutional roles. This essay calls readers to investigate the ways that composition’s flexibility has impacted and continues to impact the field’s identity and labor structures.

“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.”

Reform efforts undertaken in the name of the college- and career-readiness agenda reflect a different understanding of a balance between liberal learning, professional training, and disciplinarity that has long existed in general education programs. This article examines the different interpretations of this balance in general education and contemporary reform efforts, considering the implications of these reforms by examining their possible effects on writing education. It concludes by positing that “remodeling” (not restructuring) general education through a framework that draws on the idea of “communities of practice” (Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998) might represent a strategy for rethinking the balance between liberal learning, professional training, and disciplinarity.

Within English studies, curriculum design has typically been restricted to conversations about instructor education, where design is treated as a process of applying existing disciplinary knowledge to traditional assignments and practices. This article argues that scholars can extend the scope and value of instructor education by repositioning design as an act of inventive potential, one that invites new instructors to understand disciplinary knowledge and also to participate in the expansion of disciplinary values and practices. When fostered as an inventive act, curriculum design offers a space of welcome where new members of English studies are encouraged to contribute to the central questions and values of the field.

Recent translations of American Yiddish poetry into English have made an important chapter in American culture accessible both to the English scholar and to the literature student. Bringing together the work of two important literary groups of predominantly male poets with the work of one of the best-known female poets in Yiddish—whose aesthetic concerns overlapped with those of Euro-American modernism—I argue that the linguistic and aesthetic choices of Yiddish poetry in America not only bridge the distance between two geographies (the Old and New Worlds), but also forge a cultural scene for what I call immigrant geographies of being and belonging. Although the use of Yiddish limited the poems’ audience when they were published and, therefore, deferred aesthetic recognition of this under-studied body of poetry, I argue that the poets’ choice to write in Yiddish ultimately rendered a simultaneous desire to become American (in subject matter as well as in the adaptation of Yiddish verse to modern prosodic and aesthetic conventions) and to resist the pressure of the melting pot precisely by writing in a language inaccessible to the larger reading public. In this act of dissimilation, Yiddish poetry—like most writing in national languages published in the United States either by the immigrant or the mainstream press—poses challenges for the literary and cultural critic and teacher.

This article analyzes the writings of activist women in modern-day Juárez, Mexico. I present their explanations about their own composition and delivery of two particular activist campaigns, highlighting the rhetorical strategies and practices they developed. Looking closely at these two campaigns, the article describes the rhetorical concept of coadyuvante developed by the activists in response to the rhetorical and material problem of femicide (the killing of women based on their gender) in Juárez.

This essay questions the digital humanities’ dependence on interpretation and critique as strategies for reading and responding to texts. Instead, the essay proposes suggestion as a digital rhetorical practice, one that does not replace hermeneutics, but instead offers alternative ways to respond to texts. The essay uses the Occupy movement as an example and, in particular, focuses on the circulated image of a police officer pepper spraying protesters at one event in order to show how suggestion functions within a network of moments and associations.

Ethnography has consistently faced ethical questions since the earliest postmodern critiques of the ethnographer’s claims to objectivity in descriptive research. Concerns of how to represent ethically the ethnographic Other, to engage in activist research, and to foster collaboration among researchers and participants persist even in the age of critical ethnography and its strict attention to these issues. This article offers activity theory as a useful tool with which to address the ethical and practical difficulties that continue to plague critical ethnographers. I argue that by seeing the project of ethnographic research as an activity system as described by A. N. Leontiev and expanded upon in the work of David Russell and Yrjo Engeström, researchers can recognize the shifting locus of expertise between researcher and participant and thus design a research project that is more ethical and, ultimately, more useful for all involved. Ultimately, activity theory serves as a means of helping ethnographers recognize the actual nature of what they are doing when they conduct research so that they may confront ethical challenges in a more fully theorized fashion.

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.

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.

Rather than function simply as a metonymic, part-to-whole relation, objects on exhibit in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) also function as synecdoches, establishing a part-to-part relation that ultimately defers their connection to the historical past. Potentially, this latter relation undermines the historical authenticity that museum-goers seem to seek, and which the USHMM designers wished to inculcate.

By examining in turn a son’s craft project, a family photograph, and an image of tectonic plates, the authors demonstrate how objects can elicit rhetorical invention.

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

Traditional narratives about composition and rhetoric in modern American universities need to be complicated through analyses of what has happened to these subjects at particular institutions. For a case study, the author examines Joseph Villiers Denney’s work in establishing and sustaining a department of rhetoric at The Ohio State University.

The blogs of various Orthodox Jewish women show that the digital realm enables them to blend the public and the private. That is, it allows them to participate in Jewish life without breaking the laws of modesty that otherwise prevent them from such public engagement.

The guest editor introduces the issue’s essays by reviewing previous scholarship on Jewish rhetorical studies. She points out that the question of how to define a distinctly “Jewish” rhetoric is hard to resolve. Ultimately, she argues, an author’s or text’s relation to Jewish traditions should be pragmatically determined, through analysis of specific historical or geographical contexts.

The author calls for scholars of rhetoric and composition to become familiar with the cosmology, language, educational attitudes, speech genres, and intellectual debates of a specific culture other than their own. For a case study, she turns to Chinese history and focuses on exchanges between three models of rhetoric: Confucian, Daoist, and Legalist.

When composition students look to their teachers for vocational guidance, both groups should acknowledge that the contexts of such terms as career, mobility, and skills have radically changed. In particular, the economy now links the global with the local, and capitalism has shifted from the fordist model, dominant through much of the twentieth century, to a newer, “fast” model.

Because hybrid first-year college writing programs are an emerging phenomenon, it is important for composition specialists to identify their potential strengths and possible disadvantages. The author reviews the various forms that such programs have taken so far, and she engages in an extended critique of one particular institution’s model, questioning especially its claims to objectivity.

Wayne Booth’s model of reader response as “friendship” would seem to be severely tested by the writings of Hunter Thompson, because this author often portrayed himself as someone who was anything but ingratiating. Yet we can indeed apply Booth’s theory to Thompson’s texts, especially if we distinguish their protagonist from what Booth referred to as “the implied author.”

As a field, creative writing must reject its traditional image of “uselessness” and realize its anticapitalist, antiprivatizing potential as a creator of public space. In part, this move would involve teaching students to question traditional notions of influence, as well as the modernist concept of the author as a lone,autonomous individual.

The current interest in multimodal rhetoric was anticipated by Jacob Riis’s social documentary texts and presentations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In contrast with the socialist urban critiques presented by Friedrich Engels, Riis’s work demonstrated profound ambivalence toward the city’s poor. While calling for reform of their living conditions, Riis subjected them to surveillance and depicted them as potential revolutionaries whom the upper classes should fear.

The author calls for incorporating into English classes what he calls museum-based pedagogy, arguing that it enables the teaching of multiple literacies: verbal, visual, technological, social, and critical. In part, this pedagogy consists of classroom instruction that enables students to understand the persuasive nature of museum displays—the ways in which digital technology mediates, powerful interests influence, social agents negotiate, and multimodal texts communicate meaning.

Nineteenth-century American leaders in education came to advocate a redesign of the schoolroom that resulted in its being seen as more the province of female teachers than of male teachers. This discourse of reform serves as a case study of how space itself may be rhetorically “gendered.”

Undergraduate literature courses tend to neglect American fiction of the 1930s, especially the proletarian novel. Disregard of this particular genre is often based on the assumption that it emphasized a crude Marxist realism opposed to aesthetic modernism. Various examples of the genre are, in fact, worth teaching, especially because they do not fall simply into either camp. Such texts include John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy and Fielding Burke’s novel Call Home the Heart.

In higher education, issues of in loco parentis have been most often discussed in connection with campus administrative policies. College writing teachers need to reflect, however, on the ways they conceivably exercise parental authority in their own classrooms, through such models as the Stern Father and the Nurturing Mother.