This article examines the power of special topoi to characterize the discourse of literary criticism, and through emphasis on rhetorical action, it sheds light on the limitations of topos analysis for characterizing research articles in disciplinary discourse more generally. Using an analytical approach drawn both from studies of topoi in disciplinary discourse and rhetorical genre theory, I examine a representative corpus of 21st-century literary research articles. I find that while most of the special topoi recognized by Fahnestock and Secor and Wilder remain prevalent in recent criticism, contemporary literary critics tend to draw on only a select subset of those topoi when making claims about their rhetorical actions. The topoi they use most often— mistaken-critic and paradigm—help identify the ways knowledge-making work is undertaken in literary criticism, a discipline often considered epideictic rather than epistemic. But what the special topoi do not capture is precisely the distinctly motivated, actively epistemic character of this disciplinary rhetoric. Based on these findings, I suggest that special topoi must be seen as functioning in the context of the rhetorical action undertaken by literary research articles. These articles undertake not simply persuasion but the particularly humanistic act I refer to as contributing to scholarly understanding: a rhetorical action worth attending to for scholars of disciplinary discourse, because it is deliberately more concerned with practice than product.

Millions of users write and read freely accessible texts every day on online literary platforms (OLPs). Intra-platform surveys aside, only very few studies have considered the demographics of digital readers and authors. Our exploratory study of avid OLP users helps to close this research gap. We requested an international sample of OLP users (13 years and above) to complete an online questionnaire. Our survey gathered demographic data and information about participants’ OLP usage, motivation, (communicative) relationship with other users, and perceptions of the positive effects of OLP usage ( Nmax = 315). Among others, our results not only reinforce the theoretical concept of wreading but also indicate that OLPs are likely to enhance the pleasure derived from writing and reading. Our data show that OLP usage is not limited to adolescent users. Reportedly, for participants from Generation Y as well as from Generation Z, the experience of creative freedom and the possibility to get direct reader feedback are major motivational factors to write on OLPs. Also, our data indicate that our surveyed writers on OLPs prefer short stories. We call for more longitudinal investigations and for a common theoretical framework, in order to strengthen future research on digital literature practices and to be able to implement the didactic potential of OLPs in the classroom.

This study examined adolescents’ perspectives on their multimodal composing goals and designs when creating digital projects in the context of an English Language Arts class. Sociocultural and social semiotics theoretical frameworks were integrated to understand six 12th grade students’ viewpoints when composing three multimodal products—a website, hypertext literary analysis, and podcast—in response to a well-known literary text. Data sources included screen capture and video observations, design interviews, written reflections, and multimodal products. Findings revealed how adolescents concurrently composed for multiple purposes and audiences during the literature analysis unit. In particular, students viewed projects as a platform to emotionally affect and entertain a broader audience, as well as a conduit through which they could represent themselves as composers. Emphasis was placed on creating cohesive compositions—ranging from close modal matching to building meaning at a thematic level and creating a multisensory experience indicative of the novel’s narrative world. These findings contribute a multidimensional understanding of adolescents’ various and interacting multimodal composing goals and have implications for leveraging modal affordances in the classroom.

An extensive body of scholarship has documented the way disciplinary texts and activities are produced and mediated through their relationship to a wide array of extradisciplinary discourses. This article seeks to complement and extend that line of work by drawing upon Witte’s (1992) notion of intertext to address the way disciplinary activities repurpose, or reuse and transform, extradisciplinary practices. Based on text collection and practice-oriented retrospective accounts of one writer’s processes for a number of textual activities, the article argues that the writer’s developing disciplinary writing process as a graduate student in English literature is mediated by practices she repurposed from previous engagements with keeping a prayer journal as a member of a church youth group and generating visual designs for an undergraduate graphic arts class. Ultimately, the article argues for increased theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical attention to the discursive practices persons recruit and reinvigorate across multiple engagements with reading, writing, making, and doing.

Fahnestock and Secor’s “The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism” characterized literary criticism of the 1970s as conservative and self-celebratory. However, although literary theory has since undergone significant change, few rhetorical analyses of recent literary criticism as the preferred genre of a disciplinary discourse community have been conducted. This analysis of 28 articles of literary criticism published between 1999 and 2001 reveals that because of their flexibility, the stasis and special topoi conventions of earlier literary criticism continue to function. However, the shared values assumed in literary criticism have shifted away from a preference for isolated meditation on textual particulars. Instead, criticism is now portrayed as a conversation in which knowledge about literary texts and their historical contexts is socially negotiated and accumulative. Moreover, this scholarly project is frequently assumed to work toward social justice. The article ends with implications for understanding how knowledge is built within disciplinary communities.

This study describes the extent to which shared assumptions of literary scholars form part of an introductory literature course. Fahnestock and Secor, in The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism, describe five special topoi of literary criticism (appearance/reality, paradigm, ubiquity, contemptus mundi, and paradox) that characterize the warrants of literary criticism appearing in a sample of major literary studies journals. This study triangulates ethnographic data of a class's meetings, analyses of students' essays, and questionnaires to discover whether these topoi are communicated to students in a survey course, whether students recognize and use them, and whether students are rewarded for using them. The special topoi of literary criticism appear in the discourse of instructors and students. Though textual analysis did not reveal a connection between using the special topoi in writing assignments and receiving a higher grade, questionnaires revealed that students adept at recognizing literary values and discourse conventions were more successful.

Commentary: My intent in doing this project was to illustrate that an archaeological site as (apparently) obscure as the Amphiareion of Oropos holds a wealth of evidence about the nature and practice of rhetorical contests. Indirectly, I also hoped to illustrate that developing new methods of analysis through “field work” in classical rhetoric complements conventional arm-chair research - characteristic of literary analysis - as a source of primary evidence. The study opportunities and support that I received in 1974 and 1977 from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the Greek Ministry of Science and Culture convinced me that the Amphiareion would be appropriate for study. The Amphiareion was small enough for an in-depth examination and large enough to be known by ancient geographers such as Pausanias. From 1977 to 1985 I analyzed the information I had gathered about the site: the inscriptions my wife, Jane Helppie, and I had photographed and drawn on our field trips, the commentary of ancient sources, and the results of archaeological excavations under Basil Petracos and the Greek Archaeological Service. This study reveals that rhetoric was practiced at locations other than prominent centers such as Athens and that these practices were sustained for centuries. In the future I plan to visit other larger and better known sites in order to continue the search for information that provides the basis for a richer understanding of the history of written communication in Greece.

Although studies of writing and literary understanding have demonstrated the value of analytic essay writing for enhancing story understanding, these studies have focused on student's initial interpretations without considering the effects of a teacher's support and direction. The purpose of this study was to explore how 9th- (n = 6) and 11th- (n = 6) grade students reformulated and extended their initial written analyses of two short stories through revisions fostered by two different kinds of between-draft written comments. After revising initial drafts in two response modes (directive and dialogue), the students wrote paragraph-length responses to posttest questions of story understanding. Results indicated significant (p < .05) main effects for response condition and grade level, with the dialogue condition enhancing story understanding more than the directive condition, and the 11th graders attaining higher posttest scores than the 9th graders. Data from composing-aloud protocols revealed that the dialogue condition supported the students' reformulation of their own interpretations constructed in the initial drafts, while the directive condition seemed to shift the students away from their own initial interpretations of the stories.

That writing has unique powers for promoting learning has become a given among many composition teachers and researchers. Peircean semiotics suggest that writing is one of many forms of composing available for mediating thought and activity, and that the value of any form of mediation depends on the context in which it takes place. The present study used stimulated recall to elicit a retrospective account from an alternative school student following his production of an artistic text representing his view of the relationship between the two central characters in a short story. The student's account indicates that in composing his text he (a) initiated his interpretation by empathizing with one of the characters, (b) produced a graphic representation and transformation of the relationship between the two central characters, (c) situated his text in an intertext, and (d) produced a text that both shaped and was shaped by his thinking. Furthermore, the “text” he produced through the stimulated recall interview likely involved a reconsideration as well as re-representation of the graphic text he had drawn, thus enmeshing the investigative method itself with the student's growing realization of the meaning of his work. His account suggests that nonlinguistic texts—when part of an environment that broadens the range of communication genres available to students—can help students construct meanings that are appropriate to school activities and learning.

This article explores the usefulness of identifying the stasis of an argument, that is, whether it concerns an issue of fact, definition, cause, value, or action. The stasis of an argument can be seen as a component that has to be justified. An author must either assume or overtly appeal to the value of addressing a particular audience on a topic in a particular stasis. Once this principle of rhetorical analysis is in place, it is especially useful as an approach in the current enterprise of analyzing the rhetoric of the disciplines. While arguments in public forums naturally exploit the full stases, arguments in disciplinary contexts usually concern only the first two. “Exemplary” arguments in representative issues of Science and PMLA are then analyzed for their stasis and how they justify arguing over the issues they address. While science articles open and reopen questions of fact, classification, and cause while assuming the value of their enterprise, articles in literary criticism are problematic. They concern issues of value that are to a great extent already granted by their audience.

Literary criticism of the last decade has developed a new emphasis: the study of a work's reader alongside the more traditional study of literary texts. Some critics have suggested that literary works imply and project an audience. Drawing upon this body of criticism, as well as upon social commentary and advertising theory, this article attempts to demonstrate how composition textbook advertisements suggest, project, and perhaps even create an audience. Examining a series of composition textbook advertisements from 1982 to 1987 in addition to a number of works of art, this article proposes four different audience-related elements of the ad-object: context (the extrinsic circumstances that the advertisement connotes); genre (the kind of text or object the advertisement masquerades as); borrowings (the sources that the ad-object draws upon); and reflexivity (the image of the viewer mirrored by the advertisement). Each of these, while not entirely discrete, serves to imply and project certain features of the viewing audience. The article's conclusion speculates on the nature of this audience projected by the contemporary composition textbook ad and how this image is important to us as consumers of the ads and purveyors of the products they promote.

When writers make frequent grammatical errors, they often spend a substantial part of composing time making decisions about grammar. Studies of unskilled writers with normal hearing indicate this hyperconcern for correctness. There have been reasons to believe, however, that the attention of deaf writers who make errors is less consumed by grammatical decision making. The present study was undertaken to determine whether representative deaf writers devote as much attention to grammatical decisions as unskilled hearing subjects. Ten deaf subjects and five hearing subjects wrote and edited accounts of two short stories that were signed and spoken on videotape. Under all composing conditions, the deaf subjects' rates of pausing were substantially lower than those of the hearing writers. Combined with subjects' patterns of error correction, these findings suggest that the deaf subjects devoted substantially less attention to grammatical decision making during composition.

This article examines the relationship between current concepts of the reading process and contemporary theories of literary response. It is argued that text-based concepts of the reading process are highly isomorphic with the New Criticism that dominated literary theory from the 1930s to the 1960s, and that reader-based concepts of the reading process are equally isomorphic with the “reader-response” theories of literary understanding that have succeeded the New Criticism. It is maintained that the interactive formulation of the reading process that evolved from the conflict between text-based and reader-based formulations has been ignored by literary theorists to the detriment of developing literary theories that reflect the psychological reality of processing literary texts.

Ability to vary one's style is an important skill of mature writing, and it would be useful to have tests of this skill. We developed a cloze test to measure writing flexibility, then asked college students (all good writers) to replace sentences that had been deleted from two short stories. The style of the cloze sentences, for students with experience in creative writing, more closely resembled the original story than the cloze sentences of less experienced students. Style differences, between experienced and inexperienced students, appeared in average sentence lengths, sentence types, and verb-adjective ratios. In another experiment, less experienced students were given explicit instructions to imitate story style; they showed virtually the same adaptability to style as the creative writing group in the first experiment. Thus we have evidence that the cloze test measures style differences between experienced and less experienced writers, and also that responsiveness to style features, distinct from the skill needed to change those features, is a significant component of experienced writing.