Based on survey responses from eighty-five scholars on the job market from 2013 and 2019, this article examines mentoring for the job market in rhetoric and composition and technical communication. Respondents indicate needs for job market mentoring; more transparency about the job market itself; and more extensive, integrated support throughout graduate programs. The article concludes with actions that can be taken to improve the job market experience in rhetoric and composition and technical communication programs.

The myth of self-sacrifice is a belief in the value of caring and serving, regardless of personal cost, which characterizes attitudes toward women’s work in general and contingent faculty work in particular, especially writing instruction. “Women’s work” functions as a specific trope in the academy, particularly the high demand for such services, along with the unwillingness to pay for them. The comparison itself is not new; however, worth examining is how the very arguments proclaiming the value of women’s work in a capitalist system—and contingent work in the academy—are also used to undermine its value in that system.”

This essay examines four disciplinary challenges that faculty from broad, diverse disciplines such as rhetoric and composition encounter during tenure, promotion, and reappointment (TP&R) and highlights the arguments and rhetorical strategies that can be utilized to demonstrate scholarly worth and significance.

AbstractAtom Egoyan's film Ararat advances a rhetoric of mediated mourning that counters Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide. His characters' mourning is mediated in two senses: First, it expresses itself through the production or analy‐sis of visual texts; second, those texts interpose themselves between grieving subjects and the community with whom they identify. while Ararat attempts to visualize the unquenchable urge toward consubstantiality with an ancestral collective, the movie deliberately resists absorption by discourses that render Armenian post-exiles answerable to skeptics and to privileged audiences who appropriate narratives of atrocity for personal catharsis. Notes1. 1I dedicate this essay to my father, Phillip Dwayne Carter (1952–2014). I would also like to thank RR reviewers David Blakesley and Nathaniel Rivers for their trenchant commentary, and Theresa Jarnagin Enos for her guidance and support.2. 2See Siraganian (134) and Parker (1047). What Parker sees as Egoyan's insistence on "intergenerational embrace" also enters into Saroyan's film, which dramatizes young people struggling to support suffering parents as well as parents reaching helplessly toward lost children.3. 3Davis features the quoted passage from Burke's Language as Symbolic Action in her own Inessential Solidarity (33).4. 4See Romney (171) and Torchin (9) for discussions of Spielberg's translation of Holocaust testimony into epic spectacle.5. 5Theriault describes the circumstances of Gorky's emigration in Rethinking Arshile Gorky (15). She also observes that Gorky's ensuing work tended toward abstract experimentalism, as he experienced what Georgiana Banita describes as "an ambivalent relationship to figurative painting" (93). His simultaneous practice and suspicion of figurative representation make him an especially apt ally for Egoyan, who expresses a similar attitude toward mimetic film.6. 6See Inessential Solidarity 21. Although Davis elegantly describes Burke's grounding of identity in multiple, sometimes clashing affinities, she challenges his idea of a biological individual that precedes discourse and that engages in persuasion so as to overcome its originary division from other subjects (23–25). She posits intersubjective union as a constitutive condition rather than a frustrated aspiration.7. 7The Blanchot quotation appears in The Historiographic Perversion (10). In an intriguing turn in the same work, Nichanian also refuses to describe events in Armenia as genocide. He does so, however, from a position deeply opposed to the one adopted by Ali. Nichanian details how historians have demanded copious archival testimony to support the claim of genocide, yet argues that such testimony could never encompass the horror of what took place in Van during and after 1915. Insofar as the idea of genocide makes an intellectual commodity of unrepresentable violence, he finds it inadequate to a Catastrophe that has not ended but continues in the form of concerted denial by the government whose predecessors brought it about.Additional informationNotes on contributorsChristopher CarterChristopher Carter is Associate Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, where he serves as Composition Director. He is author of Rhetoric and Resistance in the Corporate Academy (Hampton Press, 2008) and previous editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor. His essays have appeared in Works and Days, JAC, and College English, and he has written chapters for Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers as well as Narrative Acts: Rhetoric, Race and Identity, Knowledge. His second book, Rhetorical Exposures: Confrontation and Contradiction in U. S. Social Documentary Photography, will be published by the University of Alabama Press in 2015.

Abstract St. Patrick of Ireland's legend suggests that he was a great rhetor: After all, he drove the snakes out of Ireland. As is often the case, however, the actual story is far more interesting and compelling than the myth. Born to an aristocratic family in fourth-century Britain, Patrick should have studied rhetoric in the Roman system. But when he was fifteen, he was captured by Irish raiders and sold into slavery in Ireland. As a result, he received a different sort of rhetorical education than his peers in Britain, an education that made him uniquely suited to evangelize Ireland. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers William Covino and George Kennedy for their suggestions for this manuscript. I also extend thanks to Richard Johnson-Sheehan and the members of the Rhetoric Reading Group for their close reading and valuable insight. 2Augustine and Patrick were not exact contemporaries. Augustine was born about thirty years before Patrick in 354. According to Hanson, Patrick was born somewhere between 388 and 408 (Origins and Career 179). St. Augustine died in 430; the earliest date of death that has been suggested for Patrick is about 460, and the latest is about 490. 3His name—cognate with patrician—hints at his station: His father, Calpornius, was both decurion, a city councilor and tax collector, and a church deacon; his grandfather, Potitus, was priest (before the rule of priestly celibacy was firmly established). It appears that though their lineage produced a saint, their service to the church may have been less than saintly. When Constantine became emperor, he exempted church officials from the taxation duties associated with the curiales. (If the curiales failed to raise the required taxes, he was required to pay them out his own pocket.) Thus, Patrick's father's position as deacon, or decurion, may have indicated an unwillingness to pay taxes more than a willingness to serve the Church. This loophole soon proved too costly to maintain, but it also proved difficult to close, especially as far away as Britain. The same was true for the rule of priestly celibacy, upon which the popes of the time were beginning to insist. Given the dates of the changing ordination and celibacy rules, Hanson suggests that we can date Patrick's birth no sooner than 388 and no later than 408 (Origins and Career 179). 4Patrick arrived in Ireland as the island's second bishop. Preceding him was Palladius, who was perhaps a Gaul. The fact that Ireland already had a bishop means that the Christian community in Ireland was large enough to require one. At this time, bishops were assigned at the request of the particular community. Traditionally, Palladius's bishopric was supposed to have ended in about 430, and Patrick's was supposed to have begun in 431. However, O'Rahilly argues that Palladius's tenure was shortened by hagiographers who could not deny Palladius's existence but wanted to make Patrick the “first” bishop nonetheless (15–16). O'Rahilly puts the end of Palladius's bishopric at about 461 and the years of Patrick's at about 461 until his death in 492 (8). It may also be possible that hagiographers blended Palladius—who, O'Rahilly argues, also went by the name Patricius—with the second Patricius, the Briton who became Ireland's patron saint (15). Nevertheless, no scholar doubts that the second Patricius was the author of the Confession and the Letter to Coroticus. 5Freeman's surmise may be supported by a detail offered in the Letter to Coroticus, in which Patrick describes Christians he had just baptized as “still in their white dress” (sec 3). 6In some ways it is hard to understand precisely why Patrick had such trouble writing Latin. The obvious answer is his slavery, but he would have had to make up his lost education in order to become a priest. Why, then, did that education not make him a better writer? His prose problems may have the result of disuse after so many years of speaking Irish. Latin also might have been Patrick's second language to begin with. While some historians suggest that Patrick would have spoken Latin as a first language (Thompson 40), others, like Freeman (10) and Charles Thomas (308), suggest that Patrick, as a Roman Britan, would most likely have spoken British as his first language and studied Latin in school. O'Rahilly offers a slightly different thesis, arguing that “his admittedly imperfect command of Latin suggests that he came, not from a fully Latinized district, but rather from one in which, while the official language was Latin, British was the common language of the mass of the population” (33). Mohrmann, on the other hand, suggests that Patrick would have grown up bilingual, but that “his six years of captivity . . . weakened his command of Latin very seriously” (45–46). Finally, it may be that Patrick dictated the Confession to a secretary. It's even possible that he dictated it in Irish and that the transcription and translation hampered the style. The high number of biblical quotations, however, suggest that the Letter was first composed, whether orally or chirographically, in Latin. As to his Irish, Patrick may have known a little before he ever set foot in Ireland. Patrick's family owned slaves, as did most wealthy families. Ironically enough, it is quite possible that some of their slaves were from Ireland; therefore, Patrick might have known a few words of Irish when he was kidnapped. Whatever his levels of fluency in either British or Latin, Patrick would have learned much more Irish during his slavery than he could have picked up from his family's slaves, thus gaining a skill that would later set him apart from his clerical peers. Unfortunately, like so many aspects of Patrick's life, the question of his language is clouded in mystery. 7Kennedy writes, “There is no ‘zero degree’ rhetoric in any utterance because there would be no utterance without a rhetorical impulse” (Comparative 5). 8Throughout the essay I rely on Hanson's translation in The Life and Writings of Saint Patrick (New York: The Seabury Press, 1983). I do not follow his practice of italicizing quotations that Patrick takes from scripture. Though Hanson also capitalizes the first word of these quotations, I have followed normal rules of English capitalization. 9For more on Irish mythology and its relation to rhetoric, see Richard Johnson-Sheehan and Paul Lynch, “Rhetoric of Myth, Magic, and Conversion: Ancient Irish Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 26.3 (2007): 233–52. 10I have taken this quotation from the Catholic Study Bible (New York: Oxford UP, 1990). In his note to his translation of the Confession, Hanson writes, “I have refrained from consistently reproducing in my translation of Patrick's quotations from the Bible any contemporary English translation of it, because Patrick's biblical text corresponds to no text which has appeared in an English translation. He was in fact reproducing (sometimes from memory) for the most part a Latin translation of the Greek New Testament and a Latin translation of a Greek translation of the Hebrew (and the Aramaic) of the Old Testament. His Bible therefore differed considerably in some details from ours” (Life and Writings 57). 11All Latin quotations come from A. B. E. Hood's St. Patrick: His Writings and His Life (London: Phillimore, 1978). 12There has been some dispute about whether the original text is corrupted in this place. The passage may read either as dominicati rhetorici or domini cati rhetorici, and scholars are unsure to whom Patrick was referring (Hanson, Origins 109–12). A. B. E. Hood translates the phrase as “clerical intellectuals” (43); Hanson, on the other hand, argues that it means “masters, cunning ones, rhetoricians” (Origins 109). 13Patrick manages to disguise admonitions to his audience in admonitions to himself in other sections, too. In Section 7 he writes, “I am not ignorant of the witness of my Lord who testifies in the psalm, thou shalt cause those who speak falsehood to perish. And in another place it says the mouth which tells lies kills the soul. And the same Lord says in the gospel the idle word which men shall have spoken they shall give an account for it in the day of judgment” (sec. 7). At first glance this passage seems straightforward enough: Patrick reminds his opponents that if they bear false witness against him, it is they who will be punished. However, the context dictates otherwise. In the previous two sections, Patrick has said, “For [God] said through the prophet, call upon me in the day of your trouble and I will deliver you and you will glorify me, and elsewhere it says now it is honorable to display and confess the works of God. However though I am unsatisfactory in many points, I want my brothers and relations to know what I am like, so they can perceive the desire of my soul” (sec. 5 and 6). If Patrick is reminding his audience of the stricture against false witness, he is doing it through the guise of reminding himself.

Abstract The material conditions in which most writing classes are taught-by an adjunct, who has little or no job security, is poorly compensated, and is isolated from colleagues-cannot be conceptualized as merely an "adjunct problem." This so-called "adjunct problem" cannot be separated from the ethics of the university and its faculty, from the principles of the discipline and its pedagogies, or from the responsibility of this particular adjunct and her future career decisions.

(2000). At the century's end: The job market in rhetoric and composition. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 375-389.

She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Her face curved gently into a soft oval, her skin too light for our Italian heritage, her eyes wide, brown. Waist-length, almond colored hair fell where it pleased. Her voice softly drew me near, overcoming sixteen years of shyness. We talked, walked, picked wild strawberries and laughed with our mouths full, the red juice spilling a little even as we lurched to catch it. Her voice never wavered, never rose beyond that tone that made me catch my breath to hear every word. Like Shakespeare's Dark Lady or Wyeth's Helga, she kept me from seeing any of the rest of that sunny July day. I returned home that summer to begin my first play, dedicating it to her. To her presence. To what she could inspire in me. For fourteen years between that first play's performance and our family reunion last summer-caught in the fast-paced life of college, high-school teaching, graduate school, and gaining tenure-I forgot the sense of beauty Marla could inspire in me. Until last summer when I saw her again. Almost instantly, I felt guilty for all that writing I'd put off in 14 years. All those ideas, feelings, insights I'd been excited about but then failed to commit to paper. Still, though I regretted the waste, that feeling of beauty had returned. Only this time even stronger because now I better understand what is at stake. Plato, Shelley, Steven Weinberg are right. Beauty evokes in all of us a universal urge to breathe it in, to seek it out again and again, to share it, often to write about it, to force others to feel it even though it defies such attempts. And isn't this awe for life what we continuously search for in our lives, even in our work places? Don't we all hunger for that feeling when our instincts tell us we've thought the right thought, made the right moves, heard the right words, said just the right thing to express our feelings, relate an idea, delight an audience, or move another human to action? There is in us that urge to think, act, hear, say just what fits the occasion. And we usually know intuitively when what just passed did in fact fit; we would change nothing to improve it. We yearn, we might say, to partake of the beautiful.