This study draws on Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) to examine the role of personal statement prompts in promoting or hindering the effectiveness of holistic review in graduate applications. Our analysis reveals that the content articulated in the personal statement prompts help to reify four ideological values held by the discipline. Through the framing of these ideological values, users are positioned into two major social roles: disciplinary expert and expert-in-training. We argue that, for holistic review to be effective, graduate programs must reconcile the tension between personal statement prompts that demand the writer take on contradictory social roles.

This article examines how whistleblowing evolves as a rhetorical genre alongside emergent media. By analyzing three events involving student disclosures on social media, this article argues that students’ social media communication can qualify as whistleblowing, just as whistleblowing can qualify as rhetoric. Notably, whistleblowing’s current conventions, which are heavily based in business and organization studies, suggest otherwise. This article introduces a concept called kinderuption to facilitate rhetorical analyses of whistleblowing. Approaching whistleblowing events as kinderuptions invites critical attention to audience engagement and influence, and a reconsideration of underlying themes like intention, harm, and care.

Occlusion is most commonly presented as an aspect of certain genres: occluded genres. Here, occlusion is proposed as a property of the processes by which genres are taken up. While routine use of genres creates expectations around when the genre’s uptake is commonly occluded, such expected practice can be subverted by deliberate disclosure. Occlusion and disclosure in the process of genre uptake thus become argumentative and powerful moves in communicative interaction. In three case studies, I analyze processes of occlusion in relationship to the genre of the letter to the university president.

This essay demonstrates how a progressive era Radcliffe College student (1910-1914) who earned the title “strongest woman” for her athletic feats used the unique genre affordances of the scrapbook to assert an identity that at once aligned with and contradicted dominant rhetoric about women’s bodies and education. Drawing on archived personal artifacts, the essay argues that Eleanor Stabler Brooks used this vernacular, multigenre, multivocal genre in a way that amplifies the material and the visceral through a process of bricolage, composing an embodied response to the social and institutional restrictions on her body at a time when gender values were radically destabilizing.

This piece examines In Memory’s Kitchen, a collection of recipes, poems, and letters compiled by Mina Pächter in the Terezîn Concentration Camp. The author argues that a proper reading of the text involves understanding genre, acts of resistance, and genre bending. Without applying these complex concepts to the texts, readers are at risk of misreading Pächter’s text as a cookbook rather than a memory text of spiritual resistance.

Historians of rhetoric have recently explored how nineteenth-century women’s personal and romantic letters have offered a venue for the rhetorical work of raising consciousness, building coalitions, and contesting gender norms. This essay examines the work undertaken by Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell in their courtship correspondence. Drawing on a body of manuscript letters exchanged between 1853 and 1855 and a selection of nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals, the essay argues that the couple uses their letters to: explore their views on rhetoric; contest the genre and gender conventions being taught by manuals; and engender the possibility of forming a rhetorical alliance.

This essay examines the work of Louise Clappe (1819–1906), specifically The Shirley Letters from the California Mines, 1851–1852. Clappe’s Shirley Letters are significant because she uses the epistolary genre in the form of private letters to her sister to reach public audiences, a strategy practiced by few other American pioneer women who have been studied. Furthermore, although her location in the mining camps is extremely limiting in a material and social sense, Clappe creatively details her deprivations to highlight her distinctiveness and ingenuity in adapting to California’s challenging frontier.

Scholars have paid relatively little attention to material symbolic communication in analyzing rhetoric of the body, focusing primarily on the linguistic or on nonsymbolic materiality. Yet the body communicates via a range of material symbolic practices. Delivery offers an analytical framework for understanding the ways that performing bodies communicate in multiple symbolic codes. Through analysis of neo-burlesque, the essay argues that delivery as a critical method for embodied rhetoric highlights the complex interplay between spaces and bodies and audiences that construct particular genres, providing a wider rhetorical vocabulary to critiques of neo-burlesque and other contested sites of women’s erotic performance.

Civil rights activist Sarah Patton Boyle initially encountered great difficulty when communicating about race and enacting civil rights resistance as a privileged white Southerner. This essay reveals how Boyle overcame this rhetorical failure by turning to the spiritual memoir and in so doing remade her career as a writer and a speaker. Through the concepts of confession and conversion inherent in this spiritual genre, Boyle successfully identified with white and black audiences who had previously ignored or criticized her, created a viable ethos, and delivered a sophisticated faith-based argument for social change.

Throughout history rhetoricians have referenced and relied upon theatrical practices and philosophies to enhance the understanding of rhetorical principles. Considering the affinities between rhetoric and performance can also be useful today, as writers and speakers must understand how to effectively navigate multiple performances in multiple arenas and genres.

AbstractThe public address about scientific practice is an understudied genre in the scholarship on the rhetoric of science. Recent scholarship has studied expert-to-layperson addresses but not the relationship between addresses and other science writing. This article analyzes a scientific article and two speeches by Henry Rowland, the first chair of Physics at The Johns Hopkins University, and investigates how the public address supports and develops scientific ethos. Scientific ethos is developed through the genres of the scientific article and the public address, which delineates the mental activities that are presented through more commonly studied rhetorical activities in the scientific article. Correction StatementThis article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Notes1. 1I thank RR reviewers John Campbell and Andrew King for their generous comments and my colleague Michael Zerbe for his advice and time. This article is stronger for their input.2. 2For examples of this scholarship, see Charles Bazerman's The Languages of Edison's Light, Alan Gross, Joseph Harmon, and Michael Reidy's Communicating Science, and James Wynn's Evolution by the Numbers.3. 3For examples of recent projects discussing the role of rhetoric in public debates about science, see Leah Ceccarelli's On the Frontier of Science, Alan Gross and Joseph Harmon's Science from Sight to Insight, and Aimee Kendall Roundtree's Computer Simulation, Rhetoric, and the Scientific Imagination.Additional informationNotes on contributorsGabriel CutrufelloGabriel Cutrufello is an assistant professor in the English and Humanities Department at York College of Pennsylvania. He can be contacted at gcutrufe@ycp.edu.

This volume consists of a unique genre that is compiled from Omar Swartz’s previously published “online and otherwise small print periodicals during the years of 2001–2009” (ix). The book consists ...

Nineteenth-century AME preacher Julia Foote self-published her spiritual autobiography twice during her itinerancy; the text—a blend of personal and collective narrative and sermonic rhetoric—enabled her to enter the more public, political discourse of religious activism. Foote engages in national sociopolitical debates, uses publically available histories, and manipulates genre to create a de facto church service over which she can preside. In essence, Foote’s text is a performative subgenre of the spiritual autobiography—the itinerant book—that literally circulates in print culture as an activist text and figuratively circulates within the psychic fervor of late nineteenth-century American Protestantism.

The epideictic genre of rhetoric has traditionally included public, ceremonial types of rhetoric, such as eulogies and public speeches, that affirm communities. Public memorials and even lyric poetry, however, also epideictically constitute personal and communal identities. When read through the theoretical lenses of Kenneth Burke and Emmanuel Levinas, Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child” seems to evoke a public, communal attitude in readers. This epideictic effect challenges the conventional dichotomy between public and private audiences, inviting us to think more broadly about epideictic rhetoric and its audiences.

As America entered the twentieth century, a number of women contributed to the popular elocution movement through their publication of compilations of recitation, dialogues, tableaux, and other elocutionary genres. An examination of woman-authored elocutionary compilations reveals a nascent feminism: Through their selection of pieces that examine women's changing roles and celebrate women's accomplishments—both within and beyond the domestic sphere—women compilers encouraged novice women speakers to rethink their gendered societal roles.

Abstract Mitt Romney's Mormon faith has been a topic of suspicion and debate among Christian conservatives. Romney addressed the issue in a 2007 address titled "Faith in America." This article argues that Romney's use of paralipsis helps to explain the divergent popular and academic responses to the speech. Paralipsis may be used as more than a mere stylistic device; it may also be employed as a comprehensive rhetorical strategy in an increasingly polarized political culture. Notes 1I express gratitude for the supportive and diligent RR reviewers, Andrew King and David Timmerman, whose advice enriched the essay substantially. I also thank Theresa Enos, editor of Rhetoric Review, for her efficient management of the review process. 2Transcendence is a tactic identified by Ware and Linkugel as one of four common strategies of apologia. For reference, see "Apologia" in Jasinski's Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory (21). 3Article IV. "No religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." 4For a full study of such methods, see Mark Wilson's Complete Course in Magic (Chapters 1 and 2). 5See "Oath" in the Oxford English Dictionary and the Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. Also see Margaret Sonmez's 2001 article, "Oaths, Exclamations and Selected Discourse Markers in Three Genres." 6For study on this subject, see Alexander's Mormonism in Transition, Gordon's The Mormon Question, and Aarington and Bitton's The Mormon Experience. Harold Bloom's chapters on Mormonism in The American Religion are also insightful. 7The paragraph numbers correspond to the text of the speech as published on Americanrhetoric.com. This version of the manuscript can be found at Americanrhetoric.com under "Mitt Romney." 8A text of the Oath of Allegiance can be found easily on the web (see, for example, Somerville). The similarities to which I refer here include the explicit swearing off of political allegiance from the Pope or any "authorities of the Church of the See of Rome" and the offering of it to "his Majesty" the king of England. Just like Romney, Catholics are a priori asked to shed the influence of their church and to offer explicit devotion to the nation. Also like Romney, they are asked to do this because their political leaders fear that the influence of a particular church will somehow weaken the nation and strengthen that church.

In 1854 Eliza Leslie—an author well known for her recipes, adolescent literature, and short fiction—slipped in advice to fellow women on how to write and publish under the cover of an etiquette manual. Between pages devoted to table settings, church decorum, and shopping, Leslie upheld women's right to write during a time of significant cultural ambivalence about female authorship. Leslie used the genre of an etiquette book to perform a complicated rhetorical act that simultaneously normalized, validated, and informed mid-nineteenth-century women writers at a time in which women's desire to write faced significant challenges.

Rhetoric-composition's recurring captivation with emergent brain research is sustained not only by the persuasive visual rhetoric of neuroscientific research but also by the conceptual and terministic overlaps that exist between the fields of rhetoric-composition and neuroscience. While these overlaps suggest ways research in brain science can usefully contribute to work in our field, they also instigate seductively simple “solutions” to the “problem” of epistemological uncertainty. Our neurorhetorical methodology preempts the reductive uptake of neuroscientific research while simultaneously motivating a cross-disciplinary reciprocity conducive to the goals of rhetorical inquiry and responsible writing pedagogy.

This article analyzes The Business of Being Born, a documentary that critiques dominant American childbirth practices, practitioners, and locations as overmedicalized, and offers midwife-attended homebirth as a safe, viable option. The rhetorical-cultural analysis focuses on the documentary's reception, including twenty-six film reviews and two statements issued by the American Medical Association and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The article demonstrates the role of ethos in genre reception, with a particular look at celebrity ethos associated with documentaries. The article suggests not only that visual arguments such as documentaries currently affect cultural conversations more readily than print arguments but also that dominant discourses and ideologies delimit those conversations' boundaries.

Abstract Although scholars in the field have begun to investigate normal schools, they still represent an underexamined site. One significant aspect of normal schools that has been overlooked is the educational activities of their alumni associations. California State Normal School Alumni Association, the focus of this analysis, provided a woman-centered space where women could engage in lively, rhetorically sophisticated public discussion of issues integral to women teachers in the 1890s. This analysis demonstrates that these alumni members, like clubwomen across the nation, participated in the process of transforming conventional assumptions about women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Catherine Hobbs and Vicki Burton for their thoughtful and helpful revision suggestions. I also thank Elizabethada Wright and Martha Chang for their encouragement and willingness to read earlier versions of this essay. 2For relevant research on normal schools, please see the following: Gold, "'Where Brains Had a Chance': William Mayo and Rhetorical Instruction at East Texas Normal College, 1889–1917" (2005) and Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1873–1947 (2008), chapter 3, "Challenging Orthodoxies at a Rural Normal College"; Gray, "Life in the Margins: Student Writing and Curricular Change at Fitchburg Normal, 1895–1910" (2008); Harmon, "'The Voice, Pen, and Influence of Our Women Are Abroad in the Land': Women and the Illinois State Normal University, 1857–1899" (1995); Fitzgerald, "The Platteville Papers Revisited: Gender and Genre in a Normal School Writing Assignment" (2007) and "A Rediscovered Tradition: European Pedagogy and Composition Studies" (2001); Lindblom, Banks, and Quay, "Mid-Nineteenth-Century Writing Instruction at Illinois State Normal University: Credentials, Correctness, and the Rise of a Teaching Class" (2007); Lindblom and Dunn, "Cooperative Writing 'Program' Administration at Illinois State Normal University: The Committee on English of 1904-05 and the Influence of Professor J. Rose Colby" (2004); Rothermel, "'Our Life's Work': Rhetorical Preparation and Teacher Training at a Massachusetts Normal School, 1839–1929" (2007) and "A Sphere of Noble Action: Gender, Rhetoric, and Influence at a Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts State Normal School" (2003). 3Here I draw on Gold's definition of rhetorical education. (See Rhetoric at the Margins, page x.) 4The five normal schools that Ogren investigated were Genesco, New York; Florence, Alabama; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; Oshkosh, Wisconsin; and San Jose, California. 5For examples, see Gold and Rothermel. 6As Barbara E. L'Eplattenier has asserted, "We can and should begin incorporating more explicit discussion of our primary research methods into our historical research" (68). Archival materials discussed in this article are held by San Jose State University Special Collections and Archives, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. Materials were gathered during two week-long and one three-day visit completed between 2008 and 2010. During the time I was completing research, San Jose Special Collections' staff was processing the normal school materials. As the material becomes available, it is being listed on the Online Archive of California. 7The association was also known as the State Normal Alumni Association of San Jose and the Alumni Association of the San Jose State Normal School. 8In the field of rhetoric and composition, normal school alumni associations and West Coast normal schools have received little attention. In her history of American public normal schools, Ogren includes California State Normal School among the normal schools she examined. Although clubwomen have received attention by scholars, I have been unable to locate research on normal school alumni associations by scholars of rhetoric and composition. 9This information is from an article pasted into the Minutes of the State Normal Alumni Association of San Jose for June, 1895. The article, "A Successful Session" was published in The Teacher and Student 3.1 (1895).

Abstract As Crowley and Hawhee explain in Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, debate as we know it today is nothing more than "spat, 'mere' theater" because conceptions of "opinion-as-identity stands in the way of rhetorical exchange." However, in Foucault's "Self Writing" and in Montaigne's Essais, another version of subjectivity in writing is conceptualized and practiced—one where the subject is constituted in practices at work in the care of the self. In this version of subjectivity, the productive exchange of ideas would be possible. Notes 1Thanks very much to RR readers Peter Elbow and Edward Schiappa for their careful readings, thoughtful comments, and support in the revision and publication of this article. 2That said, my work meets with an interesting danger: Though I hope that in narrowing my focus to Montaigne's essays, I might avoid generalizing the essay as a genre, or writing as a practice, and instead exercise the kind of specific attentiveness that is far better mastered by Foucault, I find resisting that move to generalize difficult, if not in some cases impossible. Despite this potential/inevitable failure on my part, my purpose here is to provide a different conceptualization of subjectivity in writing, one that could prove to be another way of potentially engaging other writers'/essayists' work, perhaps by future scholars. 3Consequently, the concept of the writer-as-agent is disrupted in Foucault's work, and as such, one implication is that this version of subjectivity takes seriously the idea that the writer is one subject being subjected by a number of forces (acting on the body, for example) and that the subject-on-the-page is necessarily something different. 4Though perhaps obvious, it's worth pointing out here that reconceptualizing essay-writing as a complex of practices subverts the idea of the inspired or innately talented essayist. If we writing teachers want to take seriously the idea that it can be taught, then this theory of subjectivity gives us a way to teach it as a complex of practices, as something other than an expressive art that the student writer is innately "either good at or not." 5Specifically, correspondence is addressed to a particular reader (usually a close friend) in an attempt to make the writer present to that reader so that the text can act as a (often ethical) guide for the reader. At least in terms of Montaigne's work, the reader was more generally conceived, and his project involved more than writing to guide, though that certainly could have been part of his purpose. 6This is not to say that Foucault does not take seriously the ownership of texts by their authors. For example, in "What is an Author?" his study of the author function does not involve any assumptions about the author-as-creator of the text or about the author manifested in the text. Rather, Foucault is most interested in the historical operations that are part of the author function, a function that does not invoke the privileging of an author's agency over/in a text but an enunciation of how the author's name provides a mode of "existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses" (211). For example, a text with the name "Montaigne" attached to it can be expected to be a prototype of the essay. It can be expected to be written in a meandering, contemplative mode, to quote many important, classical authors, to incorporate personal experiences, and to be relentlessly skeptical of its own claims. 7The similarities here in Foucault's articulation of self writing and Montaigne's description of being made by his book are very likely due, at least in part, to the fact that Montaigne was such an avid reader of Seneca's work––a writer who was very much invested in the self-disciplining practices in self writing. Montaigne goes so far as to write about the "Seneca in [him]" in his essay "Of Books" (297), and in the same essay, he states that the books from which he learned "to arrange [his] humors and [his] ways" are those of Plutarch and Seneca. (It is worth noting, too, that in the 2003 Penguin Edition of Montaigne's essays, translator M. A. Screech uses the verb control instead of arrange. See Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays. Translated and edited with an Introduction and Notes by M. A. Screech. As Foucault points out, "[T]he theme of application of oneself to oneself is well known [in Antiquity]: it is to this activity … that a man must devote himself, to the exclusion of other occupations" (Care 46). Montaigne, too, takes this occupation as seriously as the writers of Antiquity. He states, "For those who go over themselves in their minds and occasionally in speech do not penetrate to essentials in their examination as does a man who makes that his study, his work, and his trade, who binds himself to keep an enduring account, with all his faith, with all his strength" ("Of Giving" 504). 8I believe that this is a reference to a metaphor about beehives found in the opening paragraph of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, and this metaphor, perhaps unsurprisingly, also shows up in Seneca's writing. 9In "On Keeping a Notebook," Didion argues that we should use our notebooks to "keep in touch" with old selves, past experiences, seemingly fleeting ideas/images/feelings. She states, "It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about" (140).

In God's Politics evangelical minister Jim Wallis uses what I call “prophetic alchemy,” a strategy meant to reconcile and combine two opposing viewpoints—particularly liberal secularists and conservative Christians—into one progressive agenda for social change. Prophetic alchemy is magical thinking through argument, and as rhetorical strategy it participates in Kenneth Burke's alchemic tropes, particularly transcendence and division. In this article I review prophetic rhetoric as a genre, situate Wallis's rhetorical efforts in the timeline of the Protestant dialectic between progressive and conservative ideologies, and then analyze God's Politics as it participates in prophecy by attempting to reconcile opposing audiences through the symbolic power of prophetic alchemy.

In this essay I discuss and exemplify a wide range of nontraditional concepts and texts as they relate to the rhetoric of intertextuality. As a result of this inquiry, I hope to give teachers of writing and their students new strategies for understanding and producing discourse. More specifically, I hope to give readers new ways of thinking about the rhetorical situation, invention, genre, arrangement, and audience.

Abstract Lu Yin (1899–1935), a modern Chinese writer, employed a variety of vernacular genres to explore women's living conditions at the turn of the twentieth century. With her vision of nüquanzhuyi (feminism) and her conceptualization of writing, Lu Yin modeled herself as a feminist rhetorician and employed redefinition and diary/epistolary fiction as major rhetorical strategies to challenge the sexist assumptions in the prevailing patriarchal discourses and to empower Chinese women. This study further calls for a more flexible and sensitive approach to studying women's rhetorics from different cultures. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Mary Garrett and Xing (Lucy) Lu for their constructive feedback. I am also grateful to CSU–Fresno for its support of this project with a Grant for Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities. 2On May 4, 1919, students in Beijing demonstrated against the Chinese government's humiliating policy toward Japan. There resulted a series of strikes and associated events amounting to a social and intellectual revolution. These events were soon dubbed by the students the May Fourth Movement, which acquired a broader meaning in later years. 3See Chinese Department at Jinan University, Zhongguo lidai shige mingpian shangxi. 180–83. 4Unless noted otherwise the passages quoted from the original texts are my translation. 5Lu Yin was well versed in classical Chinese; her view of writing was inevitably influenced by the ancient Chinese philosophers in terms of cosmology and epistemology. This sense of a unity with the whole of society and of the world comes from the Neo-Confucian tradition—the great learning paradigm grounded in the cosmological assumption of a unity of heaven and man—which claims that the outer world may be ordered by first cultivating the inherent goodness within the individual mind. 6Since the late Qing period, Chinese intellectuals and writers had engaged in the Baihua (Vernacular) Movement in which they translated various kinds of Western philosophical and literary works, experimented with new words, sentence structures, vernacular genres, and other baihua rhetorical devices to create a new culture. See Edward Gunn's Rewriting Chinese: Style and Innovation in Twentieth-Century Chinese Prose. 7Lu Xun's short fiction "Diary of a Mad Man" was published in New Youth in May 1918. Ding Ling published "Diary of Miss Sophia" in Fiction Monthly in 1928.

The audience's violent response to the 2003 Rockford College commencement address illuminates challenges that surround the epideictic genre in a politically divided society. This essay explores the nature of the conflict that arose that day in order to consider ways in which the generic form of epideictic potentially facilitates communication among people with different views. This opportunity can be realized as rhetors and audiences acknowledge generic constraints, acknowledge social concerns, search for shared understanding, and commit themselves to an epideictic encounter that serves the educational function of constructively interrogating and reimagining public values.

In his 2007 Rhetoric Review article "Style in the Diaspora of Composition Studies," Paul Butler explains that while style seems to have vanished from the field of rhetoric and composition since the 1980s, it has actually been appropriated by areas within our discipline including genre theory, rhetorical analysis, personal writing, and even race, class, gender, and difference studies. Using Janice Lauer's metaphor of the "diaspora" of composition studies to guide his analysis, Butler examines the ways that style, like invention, has "migrated" in the field. he claims that style is both absent and ubiquitous in our scholarship. Because "style in its dispersed form is often not called style but instead is named something else within the field," it remains central to our field although its presence is masked (5). That is, while it seems as though style is simultaneously absent and present in our discipline, the concept of style has remained present and it is the name style that is now absent. Therefore, style's place within composition studies is not paradoxical at all. "Style" appears to have gradually separated from the concept with which it was associated and has taken on other names that better fit the trends and developments of our discipline.

Abstract I make the claim that even though style appears to be invisible in composition studies today, paradoxically, it is ubiquitous, and I examine areas where the study of style has diffused in the field, such as genre theory, rhetorical analysis, and personal writing. I both adopt and complicate Janice Lauer's notion of the “diaspora” as the site of style's migration in composition and argue that it is important to draw explicitly upon the field's rich stylistic resources for practical and pedagogical purposes.

Abstract I make the claim that even though style appears to be invisible in composition studies today, paradoxically, it is ubiquitous, and I examine areas where the study of style has diffused in the field, such as genre theory, rhetorical analysis, and personal writing. I both adopt and complicate Janice Lauer's notion of the “diaspora” as the site of style's migration in composition and argue that it is important to draw explicitly upon the field's rich stylistic resources for practical and pedagogical purposes.

Abstract The way rhetorical analysts now use the term appeals—meaning to plead or to please—has outstripped the available theories, particularly those derived from Aristotle. Indeed, Aristotle's ethos, pathos, and logos may not even be appeals in the modern sense. A revised model relates author and author positions to values in a triangulating relationship. Appeals also appear as techniques for working through varying media, not only media defined semiotically but also as forms of resistance related to cultural differences. Examples from criticism, film, and advertising provide a foundation for replacing a modes approach to rhetorical appeals with a genre approach.

has misunderstood me, I shall maintain, and the misunderstanding matters for our collective understanding of antifoundationalism and the genre of writing known as history. In this reply I begin with claims that are intended to challenge SC's reading of my work: First, I am an antifoundationalist. Second, I do not oppose neosophistic scholarship. Third, SC's reading of my work is overly reductionist. Then, in conclusion, I want to suggest that SC's account of antifoundationalism is problematic and that a more pragmatic version of antifoundationalism would be more consistent with SC's presuppositions and politically more useful.1 I do not understand why SC believes I am a foundationalist, since I have identified repeatedly my theoretical preferences for antifoundationalist social constructionism. SC simply proclaims, ex cathedra, that Poulakos, Crowley, Vitanza, Welch, and Jarratt are antifoundationalists, and Havelock, Kerferd, de Romilly, Cole, and I are foundationalists. Though I would be honored to be counted as part of either group, I do not understand why I am in the group that is supposed to move to the back of the bus. Why are these scholars (all of whom have published in classics journals) to be branded foundationalist? Just because they do history and work with original Greek texts? And, even if these scholars are (gasp!) foundationalists, precisely how does that make their work any less valuable?

Except for the essay and the research paper, perhaps no component of the college composition course is as prevalent as the personal journal, and in recent years the journal has become a principal export in the Writing-Across-the-Curriculum movement. Most composition textbooks contain a section on journal-keeping, and several, such as Christopher C. Burnham's Writingfrom the Inside Out, place the journal at the heart of the writing course. The journal is often associated with what James Berlin has called the Subjective approach to composition instruction, which assumes that insights arising from within the writer are of paramount importance, that reality is a personal and private construct (145). But the journal has proven versatile enough to fit almost any pedagogical model. Textbooks and instructor's guides commonly list a number of functions for the journal: creative stimulant, idea repository, experimental forum, and learning tool. The multidisciplinary essays in Toby Fulwiler's The Journal Book show its protean manifestations, including dialogue journal, learning log, team journal, math record, and office log. Theoretically, we place considerable faith in the journal and what it represents for our students-an opportunity to take control of their writing and to engage in independent inquiry. Yet many instructors who initially sense the potential of this genre give up on it when it leads to disappointing results.

When we teach, we tell a story to our students and to ourselves, a story about the acquisition of knowledge. The telling of this tale is what we usually refer to as pedagogy. A syllabus, in this view, is a kind of fiction inhabited by nonfictional characters who journey together through the plot of the story. Every syllabus, of course, tells a slightly different tale. However, when a syllabus is codified into a textbook-that most maligned of literary genres-it begins to resemble something more akin to what Jean-Franvois Lyotard calls a master narrative, a story around which other are constructed. According to Lyotard, even in an age of science, narration is the quintessential form in which how-to knowledge is established and transmitted. I would argue that in the largely literate and institutionalized societies of the West, textbooks provide us with many of these culturally essential of knowledge. In this essay I propose to anatomize the stories that four influential composition textbooks tell, both to reveal their pedagogical and epistemological suppositions and also to uncover the master narratives that give their theories of writing consequence and shape. The four texts are Rhetoric: Discovery and Change by Richard Young, Alton Becker, and Kenneth Pike; ForminglThinking/Writing by Ann Berthoff; Teaching Composing by William Coles; and A Short Course in Writing by Kenneth A. Bruffee. In the case of these four, at least, the tale told follows the ancient pattern of heroic adventure, a pattern of separation, initiation, and return. Joseph Campbell's comparative study of eastern and occidental mythologies, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, identifies a basic form of this heroic story, the monomyth.

Composition studies began to take its contemporary form only in the early 1960s. There is no unbroken theoretical tradition from classical rhetoric to the present, although scholars in composition studies have attempted to reinvent the work of earlier theorists as foundations for their own work.' Perhaps because of this discontinuity in the tradition and because composition studies has been constituted as a field so recently, there is also no dominant theory governing composition studies today. Some theorists seek the universal laws of composition, or at least a universally applicable method for investigating such laws, while others seek to understand discourse in its historical context. Not coincidentally, the period in which composition studies has developed has also been a period of theoretical upheaval in English studies, the parent discipline. Composition theorists have drawn on the contending literary theories of this period as much as on the rhetorical tradition in shaping their own debates. One reason for this influence of literary theory on composition theory is that almost every active scholar in composition studies today holds a degree in English literature, not in composition and rhetoric. This situation is changing as degree programs in composition proliferate, but the majority of faculty who design and teach in these degree programs were themselves trained as literary critics. Much important work in composition studies shows the influence of the scholars' literary training. For example, Mina Shaughnessy has subjected the essays of unsuccessful student writers to a sort of new-critical close-reading. She is thus able to show that the students' tortured sentence structures are actually attempts to make meaning, albeit meaning in an unfamiliar world, the academic. Elaine Maimon has analyzed as literary genres the various kinds of academic discourse, thus uncovering their knowledge-generating conventions. Ann Berthoff has generalized a theory of the poetic imagination, derived primarily from the work of I. A. Richards, to explain all attempts at making meaning in language. Composition specialists have not only used literary training in their own work but also urged on their students a kind of literary close-reading ability as a means to develop the students' own writing. Pedagogy such as that of Peter Elbow and Ken Macrorie assumes that the same critical eye that allows the