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March 2022

  1. Ethics and the Orator: The Ciceronian Tradition of Political Morality
    Abstract

    The impact of Cicero's writings on Western political philosophy, political communication, political ethics, and civic action is incalculable. His authority in rhetoric and philosophy was nearly unquestioned in the Middle Ages, but Petrarch's discovery of his letters revealed an apparent disconnect between the lofty sentiments expressed in his writings and his own political actions. The Renaissance preference for things Greek and for theory over practice did not replace Cicero but favored Plato and Aristotle. Political philosophers tied to powerful princes preferred the political expediency of Tacitus. Cicero's rhetorical advice remained foundational, but his political ethics and theory seemed muddled and naïve.Gary Remer's Ethics and the Orator joins an ongoing reassessment of Cicero's contributions to the traditions of politics, rhetoric, and ethics from antiquity to the present. It impressively links these three areas more tightly than before with a new and well-argued understanding of Ciceronian rhetoric and politics. Key to this understanding is Remer's appreciation for the situational nature—through decorum and prudentia—of Ciceronian ethics and politics. He then sheds new light on the political theories of Niccolò Machiavelli and Justus Lipsius. Finally, Remer extends Cicero's notions of advocacy and conversation to modern ideas about representative and deliberative democracy.Through a close reading of De Oratore, Remer shows a new understanding of Ciceronian political theory that deserves consideration by classicists as well as political theorists. Most important, he treats seriously Antonius's arguments for feeling the emotions one desires to persuade an audience to feel (2.189–90). Contrary to the dismissive attitude, in both ancient and modern times, that this makes the orator akin to an actor because he simulates “true” feelings, Remer demonstrates Cicero's consistent emphasis on the audience's expectation of this quality in an orator. The good politician is ethically compelled to observe the sensus communis in action and argument.Remer makes another excellent contribution in his reading of an important passage in De Officiis on the four personae. Cicero and other theorists understood that tension between moral and utilitarian ends might arise in the politician's obligations to argue and act. Remer sees this tension less in Cicero because Cicero understands moral actions as contingent on the specific role (persona) a political actor plays in a particular situation. He emphasizes Cicero's analysis of morality according to four personae a person assumes in any situation. These are: “(1) the role common to all humans as rational beings, (2) the persona nature assigns to persons individually, (3) the role dictated by chance or circumstance, and (4) the persona we choose for ourselves in deciding “who and what we wish to be, and what kind of life we want” (67).Apparent moral conflicts are resolved for politicians by the rhetorical notion of decorum, where social consensus and “the common good” govern political action. Remer focuses on situations that pose an “existential threat” to the state (Cicero in the Catilinarian crisis; Lincoln in the Civil War), where the analogy holds well. In such cases the politician's highly visible obligations must be grounded in decorum, prudentia, and the responsibility to act according to social expectations.In the middle section of the book, Remer applies his insight on Ciceronian decorum and prudentia to recent debates about Ciceronian influence on Machiavelli and Lipsius. Machiavelli famously rejects Cicero's claim that what is good (honestum) must also be useful (utile), and vice versa, declaring that they are often irreconcilable and the prince must choose the useful over the good. Recent studies of Machiavelli have declared his position more “intellectually honest” and “practical” than Cicero's. Remer carefully dissects the texts to show again that Cicero's notion of the honestum and utile are governed by his rhetorical commitment to decorum. Although Cicero maintains the utmost commitment to morality and claims that morality itself is universal, the same morality does not exist for all people and in all places. Machiavelli's inflexible Christian morality is a universal morality, yet Machiavelli abandons it. Cicero's understanding of the tensions between honestum and utile is no less intellectually coherent than Machiavelli's, and his commitment to moral goodness makes him more useful as a model for modern politicians.Remer then addresses Lipsius's adoption of a “mixed prudence” that allows a ruler to practice deceit to achieve a necessary end. This is considered a rejection of Ciceronian prudence for Tacitus's political realism, as part of a general trend away from Ciceronian and toward Tacitean political models. Remer, however, through close attention to Lipsius's comments on Cicero's Letters, contends that Lipsius remains a Ciceronian but adapts Cicero's theory to his own changed political and religious conditions. Although Lipsius prizes the honestum over the utile, unlike Machiavelli, he follows Tacitus in seeing that they can be flexible. Remer links this significant move to Lipsius's condition of living under and supporting monarchal rule. Another change is that the political morality Lipsius advocates is expected of a ruler, not of a politician or a statesman. This last change is important, for the Roman statesman is merely an advocate for the common good and does not have an official position to maintain. Lipsius's good ruler, on the other hand, directly governs all subjects and is also responsible for maintaining his rule, even in difficult situations that may call for expediency over moral correctness. Remer makes an important argument for considering Lipsius's changes as appropriate adaptations of Ciceronian theory according Cicero's own notion of decorum. Remer also reconciles the “Ciceronian” versus “Tacitean” readings of the early and later works of Lipsius, showing him to be more consistently Ciceronian than previously thought.Remer's third section addresses the potential for Ciceronian decorum and prudentia to relate to modern ideas of political representation and deliberative democracy. Although modern ideas of representation and representative government appear to have no clear analog to classical political theory, Remer finds a possible link in Cicero's claim that the politician is a procurator rei publicae. Under Roman law, a procurator represented in court a client who was unable to argue his or her case due to age, gender, ability, or status. Because it is understood that the procurator represents the client's interests, Remer equates his responsibility to that of a modern “trustee-delegate,” with the attendant expectations of accountability, fiduciary responsibility, and moral responsibility to the client's interests. Unfortunately, the idea of the procurator under Roman law does not easily yield these modern notions. The orator's aim of “the common good,” which obligates him to consider the benefits to all—especially his client—when arguing his position, still does not make him “representative” of those people in political decision making. The history of the Roman Republic demonstrates this well. Without this connection, the links to to Burke, Mill, and the authors of The Federalist that Remer argues for are weak, as Remer himself admits. Although modern notions of political representation may not have their true roots in ancient theory, Remer shows there may be an opportunity for discovering important similarities as well as differences.In the final chapter, Remer seeks to connect Ciceronian sermo (“conversation”) with the ideal political discussion needed for deliberative democracy. He also examines the different ideas of and emphasis on “deliberative” found in Cicero and in current political thought. He asks an important question: “Why did Cicero view deliberative oratory, and not conversation, as the main genre for politics?” (182). As in the previous chapter, Remer's close reading of the Ciceronian texts causes him to miss the forest for the trees. Specific passages defining sermo and the genus deliberativum yield convenient academic definitions, but they obscure Cicero's practice and real contribution. In Remer's defense, this is a shortcoming of Ciceronian scholarship in general. Cicero's practice in his dialogues is to use sermo, the conversational style of discussion, as a model for negotiating important political issues of the day. In the turbulent decade of the 50s, De Oratore instantiates a model of reasoned political deliberation by respected leaders who were willing to die soon for their political beliefs. Such deliberation about the proper role of the statesman was the essence of Ciceronian conversation.Ethics and the Orator is an important reassessment of Ciceronian thought and a significant contribution to understanding Cicero's impact on the development of Western political theory. It deserves serious attention by all interested in the intersection of ethics, rhetoric, and politics from antiquity to the present. Gary Remer's careful reading of major political theorists in their historical contexts restores to view the ethical foundations of the Ciceronian tradition and suggests how continued engagement with Cicero's texts might offer new models of political leadership.

    doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.25.1.0144
  2. Announcements and Calls For Papers
    doi:10.58680/ce202231771

February 2022

  1. Embracing Disruption: A Framework for Trauma-informed Reflective Pedagogy
    Abstract

    This article presents a trauma-informed integrative reflection framework to make a case for prioritizing reflection during learning disruptions, especially in community-engaged learning environments. I begin by describing a community-based service-learning course “TESOL: Theory & Practice” which includes a community-engaged learning partnership between a university English department and the Adult Basic Education division at a local community college. Then, I articulate two aspects of the TESOL course developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic: first, a framework for integrative reflection that supports adaptation and student learning throughout the semester, and second, the structures of trauma-informed reflective practice that I integrated throughout the course design. Finally, I highlight three takeaways of embracing disruption: adapting partnerships, disrupting routines, and keeping reflection at the center. Together, these themes point not only to the need for trauma-informed reflective pedagogy, but also the need to keep complicating how we live out this approach to teaching.

    doi:10.59236/rjv21i1pp115-139
  2. Rerouting Place in Community-Engaged Teaching: Lessons from the Spatial Disruption of COVID-19
    Abstract

    On March 12th, 2020, faculty, staff, and students at Auburn University (AU) received an email announcing that the school would “transition from on-campus instruction to remote delivery beginning Monday, March 16 and continue through April 10 in response to concerns about the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19)” (“Auburn University”). As all classes would be delivered remotely, students were told not to return to campus after spring break, leaving many of them to wonder if and when they’d be able to retrieve their belongings from housing.

    doi:10.59236/rjv21i1pp43-62
  3. Writing Historical Fiction Online: Community Digital Literacies in Regional Australia
    Abstract

    The COVID-19 outbreak impacted regional Australia in ways yet to be measured; for many of the country’s regions, the pandemic immediately followed natural disasters including droughts and bushfires. In such affected regional communities, activities such as writing offer opportunities for pleasure, engagement, and connectedness. Yet the restrictions developed in response to COVID-19, such as the need to move traditionally face-to-face learning online, significantly disrupted the usual way of undertaking these activities. For the New England Writers Centre (NEWC), a productive community writing organisation operating in the North Western part of the state of New South Wales in Australia. These restrictions required both quick responses and more long-term consideration of the ways writing instruction is delivered to the community it serves. This profile provides an example of a community-based writing project, an online course in writing historical fiction, developed in response to COVID-19 restrictions. The profile offers three distinct perspectives on the course: Chair of the New England Writers Centre, Sophie Masson, gives an overview of the Centre’s role in the region, the effect of the pivot to online teaching on the centre’s programming, and the initial learnings that impact the centre; online workshop facilitator Ariella Van Luyn provides an overview of the pedagogical design principles and learning objectives underpinning the design of the course and her observations of participant engagement; and NEWC program director and workshop participant Lynette Aspey reflects on her experiences learning online. Together, these three perspectives offer initial findings about online community writing instruction useful to other regional writing organisations.

    doi:10.59236/rjv21i1pp154-160
  4. Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English
    Abstract

    Since 2003, RTE has published the annual “Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English,” a list of curated and annotated works reviewed and selected by a large group of dedicated educator-scholars in our field. The goal of the annual bibliography is to offer a synthesis of the research published in the area of English language arts within the past year for RTE readers’ consideration. Abstracted citations and those featured in the “Other Related Research” sections were published, either in print or online, between June 2020 and June 2021. The bibliography is divided into nine sections, with some changes to the categories this year in response to the ever-evolving nature of research in the field. Small teams of scholars with diverse research interests and background experiences in preK–16 educational settings reviewed and selected the manuscripts for each section using library databases and leading scholarly journals. Each team abstracted significant contributions to the body of peer-reviewed studies that addressed the current research questions and concerns in their topic area.

    doi:10.58680/rte202231642
  5. Announcements
    doi:10.58680/rte202231643
  6. CCCC News
    doi:10.58680/ccc202231882

January 2022

  1. Guest Editors' Note
    doi:10.31719/pjaw.v6i1.134
  2. Editor's Note
    Abstract

    The editor's note for issue 6.1.

    doi:10.31719/pjaw.v6i1.133
  3. Rhetoric of Food as Medicine: Introduction to Special Issue on the Rhetoric of Food and Health
    Abstract

    Guest editor's introduction to the special issue on the rhetoric of food and health.

    doi:10.5744/rhm.2021.2001
  4. Rhetoric of Food as Medicine: Introduction to Special Issue on the Rhetoric of Food and Health
    Abstract

    Guest editor's introduction to the special issue on the rhetoric of food and health.

    doi:10.5744/10.5744/rhm.2021.2001
  5. Editors' Introduction
    doi:10.21623/1.2.1.1
  6. Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire by Susan Jarratt
    Abstract

    Reviewed by: Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire by Susan Jarratt Anna Peterson Susan Jarratt, Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 200 pp. Coined by Philostratus in the early third century CE, the label “Second Sophistic” (c. 50-250 CE) is increasingly recognized as an imperfect periodic designation. Does it refer exclusively to the tradition of epideictic rhetoric as described by Philostratus? Or can it be expanded to include the full range of Greek literary production during the first three centuries CE? At its core the term reflects feelings of belatedness and nostalgia, such that the common narrative of the period has become one in which an elite Hellenic identity was defined above all by paideia (“education” or “culture”). While this rooting of an elite Greek identity in the classical past is well recognized as a response to Roman hegemony,1 recent scholarship has begun to expand on this conventional view, pointing to elements of continuity both with earlier Hellenistic literature and the literature of the fourth century CE.2 Jarratt’s monograph Chain of Gold consequently sets a tall task for itself in once again addressing the cultural politics of the Second Sophistic. It is an ambitious and thought-provoking work, even if in the end it does not completely succeed in what it sets out to do. At its core, it argues for a reappraisal of the “second sophistic habit of dwelling in the past” as something that was not “monologic and static” but “varied and dynamic” and that offered the writers and performers of the period “a politically protected way of ‘talking back’ to empire.” (17) For Jarratt, the obsession with the past that has come to define this period of Greek literature is not a simple matter of nostalgia but rather of critical memory, one that allowed the authors of this period to reimagine and keep alive a deliberative civic space. Jarratt’s aim in this book is not at its core an entirely new idea. That said, what makes her work so thought provoking is her desire to locate “a colonial counterdiscourse” in a broad range of works (38). Moreover, she is certainly correct that too often classicists have been overly hesitant about reading the literature of the period through the lens of postcolonial theory (3). In addition to an introductory chapter outlining the monograph’s methodology, Chain of Gold develops this argument across six case studies, covering respectively Dio Chyrsostom’s Euboean Discourse (Chapter 2), Aelius Aristides’ Roman Oration (Chapter 3), Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana [End Page 103] (Chapter 4) and Imagines (Chapter 5), Heliodorus’ Aithiopika (Chapter 6), and Libanius’ To Those Who Call Him Tiresome (Chapter 7). Generally speaking, this is a nice mixture of well-trod and often overlooked texts. Her strongest chapters are those which connect what she calls rhetorical vision to the post-colonial concerns outlined in the monograph’s first chapter. For example, her discussion in Chapter 3 of Aristides’ Roman Oration explores how “the ‘ sophist . . . draws on the resources of [Homeric] epic to enhance his powers of visualization,” providing his audience not only “a phantasm of [Rome’s] imperium but also a techne of viewing” (47). Likewise, Chapter 5 reads Philostratus’ Imagines—an intriguing collection of descriptions of works of art—as an exploration in rhetorical vision that pushes the limits of ekphrasis. Treating the text as a museum of sorts, Jarratt acts as curator, bringing out how the text handles reoccurring images of youth, women, and different ethnicities, among others. This is Jarratt’s most successful chapter, in part thanks to the inclusion of an appendix, which maps out the paintings in relation to one another. In a few instances, however, Jarratt does not make full use of the ancient evidence. The clearest example of this comes in her discussion of Dio Chrysostom’s Euboean Discourse (Or. 7). In this speech, Dio professes that he will narrate a personal experience, relating how, after being shipwrecked in Euboea, he was taken in by a huntsman, who recounted his own troubled participation in local politics. The huntsman’s tale then prompts Dio to expound on...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2022.0011
  7. Editorial Board
    doi:10.1016/s1075-2935(22)00013-7
  8. Appropriateness as an aspect of lexical richness: What do quantitative measures tell us about children's writing?
    Abstract

    Quantitative measures of vocabulary use have added much to our understanding of first and second language writing development. This paper argues for measures of register appropriateness as a useful addition to these tools. Developing an idea proposed by Durrant and Brenchley (2019), it explores what such measures can tell us about vocabulary development in the L1 writing of school children in England and critically examines how results should be interpreted. It shows that significant patterns of discipline- and genre-specific vocabulary development can be identified for measures related to four distinct registers, though the strongest patterns are found for vocabulary associated with fiction and academic writing. Follow-up analyses showed that changes across year groups were primarily driven, not by the nature of individual words, but by the overall quantitative distribution of register-specific vocabulary, suggesting that the traditional distinction between measures of lexical diversity and lexical sophistication may not be helpful for understanding development in this context. Closer analysis of academic vocabulary showed development of distinct vocabularies in Science and English writing in response to sharply differing communicative needs in those disciplines, suggesting that development in children’s academic vocabulary should not be seen as a single coherent process.

    doi:10.1016/j.asw.2021.100596
  9. Editors' Introduction: A Journal of Moment
    Abstract

    This tenth-anniversary volume is an occasion to read A Journal of Critical Thinking and Writing reflexively, by turning its focus on critical thinking and writing back on itself as an academic genre that organizes knowledge according to time.A journal assumes time to be a linear, unidirectional movement segmented into a past, which has already happened; a present, which is happening; and a future, which has yet to happen.This sequence is inscribed in a journal's paratextuality, such as a chronological division into annual volumes, which conforms reading to knowledge configured temporally: a reference to a text locates that text in the past; an argument against locates a text in the present; and questions for further research locate a text in the future.This commonplace notion of time informs a process of inquiry understandable across the disciplines, but it is also at odds with disciplinary theories of temporality.Consider, for a moment, how the visual arts can realign perception with uncommon patterns of time.When this volume's cover image is viewed according to its title, Counter-Curve (see Figure 1), it creates a curvilinear motion that either quickens along contracting concentric circles or slows along expanding concentric circles.Each motion, as a counter-curve, implies the other, inverse motion, but the either/or structure of perception limits our awareness of time's bidirectionality, described by the image's artist, Dana Karwas (n.d.), as "a single moment curving infinitely around on itself" (para.10).As a moment, time is undivided into past, present, and future.It is instead composed of recurrences that simultaneously spiral inwardly toward an infinitesimal center of nonrecurrence, a point of origin, and outwardly toward an infinite circumference that is the end of time.Because our perception can align with time's contraction or expansion, but not both at once, Counter-Curve can perhaps explain an otherwise paradoxical experience of the moment as ephemeral and durable.If the last ten years of Double Helix is telescoped to this swirl of time, then the practice of reading the journal changes.It locates one in the moment, a condition of "mindfulness" that Ellen Carillo (2016) has advocated for reading, in which one sustains attention to the text, undistracted by the past or the future, because, in this case, neither the past nor the future exists.A sequence of texts is thereby converted into an intertext, and a reference to, an argument against, and questions for further research become recurring features of intertextuality that advance an area of knowledge toward pure originality and the completion of knowledge as ideal and inverse limits of inquiry (see Figure 2).

    doi:10.37514/dbh-j.2022.10.1.01
  10. From the Editors
    doi:10.37514/wac-j.2022.32.1.01
  11. Guest Editors’ Introduction
    Abstract

    Without our undergraduate research experiences nearly twenty years ago, this special issue of Pedagogy may not have existed. It was undergraduate research that prompted our careers as writing scholars, and it is a practice that animates our work today. At a religiously

    doi:10.1215/15314200-9385318
  12. Rethinking Research in English with Nontraditional Adult Students
    Abstract

    Abstract Adult students of diverse experiences, disciplines, and identities can become valued contributors to faculty-directed research while also benefiting from the experience. However, national data show that older students participate in mentored research at one of the lowest rates among all groups tracked. This article forwards principles for facilitating nontraditional students’ involvement in collaborative research. These were developed during studies conducted about and with adult undergraduates at a historically Black university. Student researchers’ insights, adult learning theory, and the scholarship of undergraduate research and mentoring indicate interlacing benefits that students, faculty, and English studies may gain from developing such research partnerships.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-9385488
  13. Contributors
    Abstract

    Heather Brook Adams is assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Greensboro. Her research investigates discourses of gender, reproduction, and shame as well as decolonial/intersectional methodologies. Adams's work has appeared in journals such as Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Review, and Women's Studies in Communication. Her monograph, Enduring Shame: A Recent History of Unwed Pregnancy and Righteous Reproduction, is forthcoming from University of South Carolina Press. Adams has been granted funds for implementing undergraduate research while teaching at the University of Alaska, Anchorage as well as at UNC Greensboro. Currently she teaches courses on contemporary rhetoric, rhetorics of health and medicine, and advocacy and argumentation.Brian Cooper Ballentine is senior vice president for strategy and senior adviser to the president at Rutgers University. His research focuses on humanistic notions of value within the context of the modern universities, student debt, and the pressures of economic valuation and market forces. He has served as chief of staff to the president at Rutgers, as the director of the university's office for undergraduate research, and as research director at a global consulting firm. He holds a PhD in comparative literature, with a focus on classical reception in the English Renaissance, from Brown University.Laura L. Behling is provost at University of Puget Sound. She edited the Resource Handbook for Academic Deans (2014) and Reading, Writing, and Research: Undergraduate Students as Scholars in Literary Studies (2010). Publications in literary studies include Gross Anatomies: Fictions of the Physical in American Literature (2008); Hospital Transports: A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862 (2005); and The Masculine Woman in America, 1890–1935 (2001). She taught at Palacky University, Czech Republic, as a Fulbright scholar and served as a Fulbright specialist at the American University of Bulgaria.Hassan Belhiah is associate professor of English and linguistics at Mohammed V University in Rabat. Previously, he held the positions of chair of the Department of English Language and Literature at Mohammed V University, associate professor of English and education studies at Alhosn University in Abu Dhabi, assistant professor at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco, and lecturer/teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His publications have appeared in Classroom Discourse, Journal of Pragmatics, Modern Language Journal, Language Policy, and Applied Linguistics. He has coedited a book entitled English Language Teaching in Moroccan Higher Education (2020).Andrea Bresee is a recent graduate of Utah State University with a degree in English teaching and a composite in writing. While at Utah State University, Andrea served as an undergraduate teaching fellow for three upper-level English classes, as well as an undergraduate researcher for three separate studies. She was named the English Department Undergraduate Researcher of the Year in 2019 and has presented at three undergraduate research symposiums and conferences. Andrea now teaches seventh-grade English at Space Center Intermediate School in League City, Texas.Kendra Calhoun is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research examines the intersections of language, race, and power in face-to-face and social-media contexts. Her dissertation analyzes diversity discourse in US higher education and its effects on graduate students of color. She served as a research mentor and instructor to undergraduate students in the UCSB-HBCU Scholars in Linguistics Program, and she recently published on Black-centered introductory linguistics curriculum in Language.Anne Charity Hudley's research and publications address the relationship between English language variation and K–16 educational practices and policies. She is the coauthor of three books: The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research: Success in and beyond College (2017), Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools (2011), and We Do Language: English Language Variation in the Secondary English Classroom (2013). She is the author or coauthor of over thirty additional articles and book chapters. She has worked with K–12 educators at both public and independent schools throughout the country. Charity Hudley is a member of the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA).Dominic DelliCarpini is the Naylor Endowed professor of writing studies and dean of the Center for Community Engagement at York College of Pennsylvania, where he also served thirteen years as writing program administrator and five years as chief academic officer. He founded and administers the annual Naylor Workshop on Undergraduate Research and is coeditor of the Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies (2020) as well as other articles on this topic. DelliCarpini served as president of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, secretary of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), and as a member of the CCCC's Committee on Undergraduate Research.Mariah Dozé is a 2020 graduate of Emory University, where she received a BA in African American studies and sociology. While at Emory, she served as a research assistant studying racial disparities in capital punishment and a writing tutor, among many other positions. Dozé’s research exploring the intersection between rhetorical studies and social justice was awarded publication in the peer-reviewed scholarly journal Young Scholars in Writing. For this accomplishment, she was recognized as an Emory Undergraduate Research Program featured researcher. She is now a Georgetown Law 1L and intends to specialize in human rights law.Cecily A. Duffie is a PhD student in English literature at Howard University. She graduated cum laude from the University of Florida with a BA in African American studies with a concentration in journalism. Her master's thesis was on cycles of postmodernism in the work of contemporary Black women writers, particularly Terry McMillan and Toni Morrison. She has been selected as an UC/HBCU Initiative scholar, NeMLA panelist, and Howard University Research Week panelist and presenter. She has also been published by the Miami Herald. She writes Tudor-era historical fiction and southern Black gothic fiction.Jeremy Edwards is a PhD candidate in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines higher-education practices and policies that impact college access and student development. His dissertation explores the relationships between Black students and the UC system in thinking about levels of support and advocacy for Black students on recruitment, retention, and postgraduation career plans. He was a co-instructor for the UCSB Engaging Humanities Initiative, was a 2019 graduate fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and served as a coordinator and mentor of the UCSB-HBCU Scholars in Linguistics Program.Jenn Fishman, associate professor of English and codirector of the Ott Memorial Writing Center at Marquette University, is a widely published, award-winning scholar and teacher whose current work addresses community writing and listening, longitudinal writing research, and undergraduate research in writing studies. She has edited special issues of CCC Online, Peitho, and Community Literacy Journal, as well as The Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies (2020), and contributed national professional leadership through various roles, including inaugural cochair of the CCCC Committee on Undergraduate Research and president of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition.Lauren Fitzgerald is professor of English and director of the Wilf Campus Writing Center at Yeshiva University where she recently chaired the Yeshiva College English Department. With Melissa Ianetta, she edited Writing Center Journal (2008–13) and its first undergraduate research issue (2012) and wrote The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors: Practice and Research (2015). She has also published on writing center undergraduate research in Writing Center Journal (2014) and the edited collection How to Get Started in Arts and Humanities Research with Undergraduates (2014).Hannah Franz is the Program Associate for Graduate Advisement at the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. Her scholarship focuses on equity and inclusion in high-impact practices, such as undergraduate research and writing-intensive courses. She is coauthor of The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research: Success in and beyond College (2017) and has published in Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research.Collie Fulford is professor of English at North Carolina Central University. Her recent work on writing program development, writing across the curriculum, and the scholarship of teaching and learning has appeared in Pedagogy, Composition Studies, Across the Disciplines, and Journal of Effective Teaching in Higher Education.John S. Garrison is professor of English at Grinnell College, where he teaches courses on early modern literature and culture. He is coeditor of three essay collections: Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England: Literature and the Erotics of Recollection (2015), Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature (2020), and Making Milton (forthcoming). His books include Shakespeare at Peace (2018), Shakespeare and the Afterlife (2019), and Performing Gods in Classical Antiquity and the Age of Shakespeare (2020).Ian Golding is an assistant professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, Blue Ash. He is the editor of Queen City Review, an international journal of undergraduate research. His research addresses student agency, archival practices, and visual media.Kay Halasek is professor of English and director of the Michael V. Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning at Ohio State University. Halasek's research spans a range of topics within rhetoric and writing studies: feminist historiography, teaching writing at scale, collaborative learning, writing program administration, portfolio assessment, and basic writing. She is the author of A Pedagogy of Possibility: Bakhtinian Perspectives on Composition Studies (1999), which received the CCCC Outstanding Book award. As director of the Drake Institute, she leads enterprise initiatives in instructional support for faculty and graduate students and research on and policy development related to teaching and learning.Abigail Harrison graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) in 2020. Her area of focus is English with minors in rhetoric and public advocacy and communication studies. While at UNCG, she participated in hands-on undergraduate research highlighting rhetoric in both historical and contemporary media. Her scholarship on rhetorical theory within university media centers can be found in the Communication Center Journal.Rachel Herzl-Betz (she/her) is the Writing Center Director and assistant professor of English at Nevada State College. She earned her PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and began her writing center career at Carleton College. Her research focuses on intersections between disability, writing center studies, and educational access. Most recently, she has pursued projects centered on equity in Writing Center recruitment and the impact of “access negotiation moments” for disabled writing instructors. In 2017, her first novel, Hold (2016), received the Tofte/Wright Children's Literature Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers.Katherine Hovland is an undergraduate student at Marquette University, double-majoring in writing-intensive English and data science. She was a member of a research team in the Ott Memorial Writing Center that studied the accessibility of writing on Marquette's campus.Kristine Johnson is associate professor of English at Calvin University, where she directs the university rhetoric program and teaches courses in linguistics, composition pedagogy, and first-year writing. Her work has been published in College Composition and Communication, Composition Studies, Rhetoric Review, WPA: Writing Program Administration, and Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education. An associate editor of Pedagogy since 2019, her research interests include writing program administration, teacher preparation, and undergraduate research.Rachael Scarborough King is associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She is the author of Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres (2018) and editor of After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures (2020). She is also principal investigator for the Ballitore Project, a project combining archival research and digital analysis at UCSB Library's Special Research Collections.Joyce Kinkead is Distinguished Professor of English at Utah State University. In 2012, she was named a Fellow of the Council on Undergraduate Research. As associate vice president for research, overseeing undergraduate research, she instituted University Undergraduate Research Fellows, the Utah Conference on Undergraduate Research, and Research on Capitol Hill. Dr. Kinkead is a scholar of writing studies and undergraduate research; her titles on undergraduate research include the following: Researching Writing: An Introduction to Research Methods Undergraduate Research Offices and Programs (2016), Advancing Undergraduate Research: Marketing, Communications, and Fundraising (2010), Undergraduate Research in English Studies (2010), and Valuing and Supporting Undergraduate Research (2003).Danielle Knox is a Black creative writer who graduated from Howard University with a bachelor's degree in English. A prospective graduate student, her research interests include gender and sexuality across the African diaspora while noting the ways Black queer communities define and express themselves outside of a white Western context. She also desires to help challenge systemic inequalities, promote funding for public libraries, and support all forms of Black literature and art.Addison Koneval (she/her) is a doctoral candidate at The Ohio State University. Her work in rhetoric, literacy, and composition primarily focuses on culturally sustaining pedagogies. Most recently, she has been working with grammar education in first-year writing settings.Susan Lang (she/her) is director of the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing and professor of English at The Ohio State University. Lang has extensive experience in teaching online and hybrid courses in technical communication at both undergraduate and graduate levels. She and colleagues at Texas Tech also developed Raider Writer, program-management software for large writing programs. Her research examines aspects of writing program administration, writing analytics, and technical communication. Her work has been published in College English, College Composition and Communication, Writing Program Administration, and Technical Communication, among others. She is the recipient of the 2016 Kenneth Bruffee Award for Best Article in Writing Program Administration and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Writing Analytics.Bishop Lawton is a PhD student in history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include Pan-African Intellectual History, the history of precolonial African civilizations, and twentiethth-century Black movements. In further pursuit of his interests, in June 2020, Bishop became a writer for blackpast.org, the largest online encyclopedia of African American history.Ali Leonhard is an undergraduate at Marquette University, double-majoring in forensic science and philosophy. She was a part of the Ott Memorial Writing Center's research team that looked at the accessibility of writing on Marquette's campus.Hayden McConnell is an Elon University alumna. She graduated with a major in professional writing and rhetoric as part of the English Honor Society. Her research addresses the lack of video content that addresses the topic of rhetoric in an engaging manner while also using successful rhetorical strategies. Her work has many intentions, but the overarching goal is to begin providing more visually stimulating content that discusses rhetoric and its many branches for both new and current members of the field.John Henry Merritt is a senior English major and Mellon Mays fellow at Howard University. His research interests include African American fiction, postmodernism, literary theory, and the digital humanities. Currently, he is interested in using Twitter data to develop reader-response based analyses of blockbuster movies. His senior thesis examines the function of the underground as a setting throughout African American fiction. In his free time he likes to write code and study languages. After graduation, he hopes to pursue a PhD in English literature and get a puppy.deandre miles-hercules (they/them), MA, is a doctoral student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They are originally from Prince George's County, Maryland, and obtained a BA in linguistics with minors in anthropology and African American studies from Emory University. Their research focuses on language as a nexus for the performance of race, gender, and sexuality in the domains of sociality and power, specifically as it pertains to Black, femme, queer, and trans communities. deandre currently holds a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.Jessie L. Moore is director of the Center for Engaged Learning and professor of professional writing and rhetoric in the Department of English at Elon University. She is the coeditor of three books, including Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research (2018). Her recent research examines transfer of writing knowledge and practices, multi-institutional research and collaborative inquiry, the writing lives of university students, and high-impact pedagogies. She served as Secretary of the CCCC, founded the CCCC Undergraduate Researcher Poster Session, and currently cochairs the CCCC's Committee on Undergraduate Research.Jamaal Muwwakkil (he/him), MA, is a PhD candidate in the department of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jamaal is originally from Compton, California, and transferred from Los Angeles City College to University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned a BA in linguistics. Jamaal's research focuses on political discourse, African American language and culture, and linguistic practices in educational and university contexts.Angela Myers is a professional writing and rhetoric alumna of Elon University. She was an honors fellow and a Lumen scholar, a two-year, competitive grant award earned by only fifteen Elon students each year. Her research addresses the rhetorical strategies of sexual violence prevention courses for undergraduate students.Sunaina Randhawa is a Marquette University alumna. She graduated in 2020 with a BA in English literature and minors in writing-intensive English, anthropology, and digital media. Along with a team of researchers from Marquette's Ott Memorial Writing Center, she worked in conjunction with the Office of Disability Services at Marquette. With their help, she and her team determined both the ways in which they could make writing more and the ways in which the writing center could help that Michael associate professor of English at the University of North as codirector of first-year composition and senior faculty fellow with Center for and He The Writing of (2018) and coedited Perspectives on and Writing He is currently and with undergraduate students that are on curriculum and is a of 2020 graduate of Grinnell College, with a major in English. He is a Undergraduate a research project on of by contemporary of the of the of the he has presented at and participated in a research at the University of in He to pursue a PhD in has a PhD in literary and studies from Mellon University, where she teaches courses on literature, and gender studies. Her current research explores can writing in the humanities. Her work on literature examines the ways in which and discourse the of gender as a modern of has a PhD in rhetoric and composition from Texas University. She Emory University as director of the Writing She has also been associate professor at College, associate professor and chair of English and language at University, and associate professor and chair of communication studies at King University. Her research in the intersections between literature and rhetoric as well as in teaching and She is a book on the in the She also coedited the Journal of the on Perspectives on Learning for is an undergraduate student in and in English and at Nevada State College. As an undergraduate writing and his work and code is professor of English and dean of the College of Arts at University. He taught undergraduate writing and graduate in the Rhetoric and Composition His scholarship focuses on writing program and the teaching of writing.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-9385641
  14. Comment on Verhulsdonck and Shah's “Lean Data Visualization: Considering Actionable Metrics for Technical Communication”
    doi:10.1177/10506519211054926
  15. Rhetoricity at the End of History: Defining Rhetorical Debility under Neoliberal Colonialism
    Abstract

    This essay conceptualizes and applies a theory of rhetorical debility to new materialist rhetorical studies. Drawing from critical disability studies, rhetorical debility frames the ways that hierarchical human and nonhuman relations can inhibit certain rhetoricities while enabling others under neoliberalism. This theory extends the concept of “rhetorical capacities,” located within a genealogy of new materialist and posthuman thought in rhetorical studies, in response to intersectional critique of new materialism from Indigenous scholars and disability studies. The essay demonstrates rhetorical debility’s applicability to transnational sites of oppression along axes of disability, colonialism, and neoliberalism through a case study analysis of Palestinian protest rhetoric.

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2021.1990378
  16. Announcements and Calls for Papers
    doi:10.58680/ce202231681
  17. In This Issue
  18. Through Students’ Voices: What Does the Death of a Writing Center Tell Us?
    Abstract

    While rich scholarship has delved into the lives, accomplishments, and struggles of writing centers, the closing, or “death” of writing centers has been largely underexplored. With a survey and a focus group, this study examines students’ perceptions of and reaction to the closing of a satellite writing center on a regional campus of a Northeastern, mid-size, public research university in the United States. This study revealed: 1) the student participants not only viewed the satellite writing center as an important resource but also a community, 2) they expressed sadness and disappointment toward the writing center closing, maintaining that the writing support should be offered to students, and 3) after the writing center was closed, some of them utilized various alternative writing support, while others did not. By inquiring into the death of a writing center, this study enriches and complicates the writing center grand narrative that McKinney (2013) calls us to problematize. Furthermore, based on findings that revealed students’ writing-related help-seeking behaviors in response to dramatic changes, implications are offered to writing center professionals and educators who seek to cultivate students to become resourceful and resource-savvy writers, especially in a time of challenges and changes. Keywords : Writing center closing, satellite writing center, writing center storying, writing resourcefulness “It’s been a fun ride: Armstrong State University says farewell to the SWCA Annual Conference” “Writing center closes due to lack of funding” “The death of a ‘writing center’?” “Farewell,” “close,” “death,” … these words are sad, final, and carry a sense of despair. When such words are associated with writing centers, they tell sorrowful stories that dishearten us writing center professionals. As a scholar dedicated to writing center work and research, I have not only heard about such stories but also lived one myself. With my exciting experience of creating a writing center from scratch with my colleagues in China and directing it for three and a half ye ars, I found it all the more difficult to witness the death of a satellite writing center in a United States university during my first doctoral year as a graduate assistant. Having worked at this small satellite writing center as the assistant director for a semester, I still remember how I felt when I first stepped into the cozy, colorful room that we called “writing center” on that small regional campus, which is about 33 miles from the main campus of a Northeastern, mid-size, public research university: I felt joy, excitement, and promise; I was ready to work closely with student writers, create new initiates, and make real changes within my anticipated two years there—the same kind of vitality and aspiration that I had when I created my writing center at a Chinese university four years ago. However, I did not have all that much time to compose my chapter in the story of this writing center—my chapter came to an abrupt end in the m iddle of the academic year. Without much of a warning, the decision to close the satellite writing center was passed down and all of a sudden, I found myself helping my director take down posters and students’ works from the wall, packing books and tutoring records with huge, black plastic bags, and giving stationery away to students. We finished it within a few hours, so quickly that I couldn’t help asking myself: so, this is it? That’s how we ended the life of a writing center after it had served the campus for more than a decade? Had it served its purposes? What about our students? What are they going to do when they need help with their writing? My head was spinning. I didn’t know. A winter break later, I start ed my new assignment working at the university writing center on the main campus, but those questions did not cease to bother me. In a quiet corner of my heart, I kept wondering about my closed satellite writing center and the students who I used to spend time with. I wanted to know, out of personal concern and curiosity, whether the disappearance of the writing center had any impact on the students and how they reacted to the loss of this long-existing campus resource; meanwhile, as a writing center scholar who found little literature on writing center closing, I wonder what knowledge we can gain by delving into the death of this small writing center to enrich our understanding of the lives of writing centers. To me, the life story of my writing center was finished without an ending. To tell its full story and to make meaning that might speak to many other writing centers’ (untold) stories, I conducted an empirical study to probe into my most pressing question: how did the students on the regional campus perceive and react to the closing of the satellite writing center? With a qualitative design that consisted of an online survey and a focus group discussion, I obtained input from the academic students who the satellite writing center had served, striving to draft the final chapter of this writing center’s life through students’ voices. As such, the significance of my study is two-fold: 1) by investigating how students felt about and coped with the closing of a satellite writing center, I examine the impact of the writing center closing through students’ voices, and 2) unlike the more prevalent research that has looked into the vigorous life of writing centers, I seek to tell another side of writing center stories through an iconoclastic inquiry into the death of a writing center, which can enrich and complicate the writing center grand narrative, one that Jackie Grutsch McKinney (2013) calls us to problematize. Furthermore, based on my findings that revealed students’ help-seeking behaviors in response to dramatic changes, I offer implications to writing center professionals and educators who seek to cultivate students to become resourceful and resource-savvy writers, especially in a time of challenges and changes. Amid scholarship that documents and theorizes the lives of writing centers, the “deaths” of writing centers are largely underexplored, and research that specifically examines writing center closing is rare. With the bulk of our scholarship focusing on the development and improvement of writing center praxis, we tend to perpetuate the writing center grand narrative, which depicts writing centers as “comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing” (McKinney, 2013, p. 3). However, if we honor this representation as if it were the solely true version of writing center story, we risk creating “a sort of collective tunnel vision” (McKinney, 2013, p. 5) that fails to capture the complexity and richness of writing center storying—writing centers do struggle, they get eliminated, and their closing is by no means inconsequential. Writing center closing deserves scholarly attention, because they are not only a phase of writing center life, but also a generative component of writing center storying. Thus, one promising research direction is to delve into how the closing of a writing center impacts the students it used to serve. As such, this study aims to contribute new insights to the writing center community through an investigation of students’ perceptions of and reaction to the closing of a writing center. To do so, I review extant literature on writing closing as follows. Outside of traditional academic publication venues, brief reports of writing center closing have appeared on webpages, such as McDonald’s (2016) online article reporting on students’ and staff’s anger over the New Jersey City University’s plan to shut down their writing center, Spitzer-Hanks’ (2016) blog post about the shutdown of tutoring services at the University of British Columbia Writing Center, and Farley and Nealey’s (2017) report on the closing of the writing center at Savannah State University due to the lack of funding. However, all of these sources only report on the closings without in-depth discussion about their impact. On the other hand, writing center scholarship, especially empirical research, rarely investigates the reasons, processes, and repercussions of writing center closing, except for bits and pieces that scatter over literature. For example, in her study that examines how writing centers are positioned in the political-educational climate in the United States, Salem (2014) mentions in her method section that with a sample of nearly 400 accredited institutions, “a number of institutions included in the original sample ultimately had to be dropped from the analysis. Some had closed or lost accreditation, and others had stopped offering baccalaureate degrees” (p. 21). This statement reveals that some writing centers closed due to the closing of their housing institution, which is only one reason for writing center closing. Similarly, Essid (2018) states that the integration of writing centers to learning commons has appeared to be a means to re-structure academic entities, while Reese (2017) suggests that the merging of universities has led a university writing center to become a satellite institution. H owever, little research appears to delve into the disappearance, closing, and “deaths” of writing centers, which calls for thorough inquiries into the impact and consequences of writing center closing. An exception is Cirillo-McCarthy’s (2012) year-long comparative study of two writing centers through ethnographic and textographic methodologies: The University of Arizona Writing Center in the U.S. and London Metropolitan University’s Writing Center in the U.K. Cirillo-McCarthy (2012) discusses three crises that these two writing centers reacted to, including crisis of access, crisis of literacy, and crisis of funding. In particular, despite their director’s efforts of gaining support from international writing studies and writing center scholars through support letters, London Metropolitan University’s Writing Center was rendered in a reactive instead of proactive place and was finally eliminated due to the lack of funding. In contrast, although it was also faced with a funding cut, the University of Arizona’s Writing Center survived by reacting stra tegically, including finding a new home in a centralized student tutoring space and charging a nominal fee to all students. The struggles of these two writing centers portray a realistic picture of the various and mundane crises that writing centers face as well as the different fates of writing centers resulting from different reactions toward crises. In the case of the present study, the satellite writing center in question had also suffered from different crises prior to its closing: 1) it received little funding from the university (e.g., when activities such as a scavenger hunt was held at the satellite writing center, the director brought home-baked muffins rather than receiving financial support from the university), and 2) the drastic shrinkage of academic student enrolment on the regional campus—from several hundreds to around twenty five—called the necessity of the satellite writing center into questions and further threatened its already peripheral status, which all contributed to its final closing. In short, because the limited literature on writing center closing are either brief reports on closing or studies that approach the issue from the administrator’s perspective rather than the student’s perspective, our knowledge about writing center closing is limited to the reasons for closing and the fight against closing—which tends to end with the closure itself. Ther efore, by in vestigating the impact of writing center closing in a post-closure fashion and through students’ voices, the present study is the first of its kind. With a focus on how the students perceived and reacted to the closing of a satellite writing center, I aim to draw writing center scholars’ attention to and initiate much-needed conservations about writing center closing.

  19. Writing Centers as Critical Communities: Redesigning Community Through Critical Dialogue, Rhetorical Listening, and the Critical Embrace
    Abstract

    In this reflective essay, I consider how to build a more intentional community in order to foster confidence among undergraduate writing consultants. After 18 months of remote work and minimal community-building success, our staff seems hesitant to embrace the potentials afforded to the job of writing tutor. As I plan for a return to campus and look ahead to my eighth year as a center director, I’m reimagining our writing center community as a “critical community” (Bettez & Hytten, 2013) in which undergraduate consultants participate in ongoing self-reflection and critical dialoguing across and amidst difference. In such a community, the “critical embrace” can manifest both sides of its claim: a loving, honest, analytic challenge provided to a member of a community so that they might learn and grow; a critical perspective provided between people who care for one another and for their larger community (Gramlich, 2019). I hope to generate community building that leads to bold, brave, confident consultants, especially when it comes to supporting a writer beyond their basic requests and engaging in conversations about identity, race, and writing. Keywords : Community, community-building, tutor training, social justice, antiracism, critical writing center work, critical embrace As with so many writing center administrators around the country and the world, I spent 2020 and much of 2021 attempting to maintain some semblance of community among our program staff: creatively arranging office hours, testing various staff discussion board options, rolling out new mentoring formats, and desperately trying to figure out how to play games with 30 people on Zoom. In this strangest of times, I’m sure we’ve all been reflecting on community and what community both means and looks like in our centers. Our rural, R-1 university in the Pacific Northwest has been fully online and remote since March 2020; as I write this (spring 2021), we’re entering month 18 of remote education, and we’re not heading back to campus until fall semester. I know this isn’t the experience of all writing center tutors or administrators, but I’m certain that, regardless of the amount of time spent away from our physical locations and from one another in-person, we’re all imagining how our communities might change and evolve as we continue to persevere through the pandemic. As I scan my professional memories, I see how a strong community supports and emboldens writing consultants. In one of our program’s ‘eras,’ the undergraduate consultants crafted a statement of antiracist commitment, our local response to a similar declaration at one of our fellow Washington state schools. The cohort of consultants leading that effort were deeply connected with one another and with our program’s mission, and they boldly embraced a most challenging endeavor of critiquing our institutional position and our practices to establish an antiracist agenda we still hold central today. The last year and a half exist in stark contrast to that moment in our program’s history. We’ve been isolated, insulated, cut off from one another. Our gatherings over Zoom were mostly just painful silences and awkward interactions. The sense of community in our program is lagging, and it shows in the collective confidence of the staff. There’s one consequence that weighs particularly heavy on my mind: our ability, as a program and as individual writing consultants, to engage in important and challenging conversations during sessions, particularly around power, privilege, race, and language. Since 2015, tutor training and professional development have prioritized studying white supremacy and racism in education and imagining what a writing center generally and writing consultants individually can do to disrupt and dismantle systems of oppression within education and writing instruction. We’ve had ebbs and flows in terms of our progress toward our mission and goals, but the last year and a half has felt like a particularly noticeable ebb. As a result of some targeted reflective activities and conversations, I’ve found myself wondering how membership in an intentional community develops tutors who are ready, confident, and eager to challenge white supremacy and to engage with race and racism in their sessions. In this essay, I will reflect on my experiences directing a writing center and my recent deep dive into the intersections of community, writing tutoring, tutor training, and antiracism. I’ll share my exploration of community building in writing center scholarship and my process toward new consultant training that, I hope, might foster more confidence among undergraduate staff to push the boundaries of “writing tutor” and imagine new opportunities for engaging and collaborating with writers.

2022

  1. From the Editors: A Critical Encomium to Pasts, Presents, and Futures
  2. From the Guest Editors: Advocating for Writing and Well-Being
  3. Self-Determination Theory and Authenticity: A Response to Power Inequities within Higher Education
  4. From the Editors: A Three-Year Check-In
  5. List of Contributors
  6. Responding for Transfer
    Abstract

    In this article, I present the results of a national study of response to student writing and argue for an approach to response I call Responding for Transfer (RFT). My corpus includes peer and teacher responses to 1,054 rough and final drafts of student writing from across the curriculum as well as 128 student self-reflection essays from ePortfolios at seventy institutions of higher education across the U.S. I present evidence from this corpus to support my argument for an RFT approach that emphasizes student self-assessment, focuses teacher response on student metacognition rather than the products of drafts, and takes response into consideration in the design of vertical transfer curriculum.

  7. Front Matter
  8. Back Matter
  9. Front Matter
  10. Back Matter
  11. Front Matter
  12. Back Matter

December 2021

  1. Information for Authors
    doi:10.1109/tpc.2021.3127618
  2. Editorial Board
    doi:10.1016/s8755-4615(21)00062-1
  3. What Works for Me: Writing Matters in the Real World: Student Letters to the Editor
    Abstract

    Preview this article: What Works for Me: Writing Matters in the Real World: Student Letters to the Editor, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/49/2/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege31664-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/tetyc202131664
  4. Announcements
    doi:10.58680/tetyc202131667
  5. The Weimar Origins of Rhetorical Inquiry
    Abstract

    When we pick up a big book like this with big names including Heidegger, Arendt, Benjamin, and Warburg, we want to learn something significant we don't already know by way of reading and reputation. And if we are in rhetoric per se, we are especially eager to see how these people are attached substantially to a field that none of them claimed. Following from these initial expectations, we are then owed a plausible methodology that tends neither toward the wish fulfillment of big rhetoric, nor toward one of the more conventional methods—for example biographic, or dictated by the more familiar scripts of philosophy, politics, and art history—that would render these surprises unlikely because the field would have been smoothed already; to break new ground one usually needs a new approach. Finally, we would want to know what's the point of this new approach beyond novelty per se—what can we think and do differently along these new lines? Marshall's book delivers richly on all these efforts. In what follows, I explain how, while keeping in play a pressing question about what intellectual history has to do with a larger and seemingly distant field of rhetorical studies, which is more often concerned not with big names, but with no names like “students” and the authorial commonplaces found in schoolrooms and textbooks.First a note on structure. As a book reviewer and longtime book review editor myself, I have always discouraged chapter-by-chapter reviews because that sequential structure tends to prioritize description over argumentation. In the case of Marshall's book, however, any careful argument about what the book does (or doesn't) do depends upon a sequential and experiential “here's what we know—here's what we don't know” structure of the book itself. One interesting quality of Marshall's argument, in other words, is his persistent challenge to the reader who is asked to review their own intellectual habits and presuppositions, while looking for worthwhile opportunities at Marshall's suggestion. Marshall's argument has an experiential quality part and parcel of his method explained below, which has to be evaluated in terms of its qualities: How might those scripts and presuppositions be mine after all? As a reader, what possibilities do I now see? Such qualities would not show up in the first place if I structured this review around the main claim found in the title, for instance. The primary point of the book would go missing if one were to argue whether rhetorical inquiry indeed has Weimar origins, and if so, to what extent. Missing, precisely, would be the book-length and sequential argument about the sayability of the title itself. What habits of language and thought produce the possibility of this title? The first part of Marshall's book addresses this first question. Then: What can we do with that title once it becomes a real possibility? The latter part of Marshall's book addresses that second question.Forgoing the catchy hook recommended by rhetoric, this ultimately thrilling book experience starts instead with the intentionally familiar. Chapter 1, “The Weimar We Know and the Weimar We Do Not Know,” begins by running “a standard received version of the Weimar origins of political theory” in order to set the scene for a more generative set of rhetorical presuppositions (31). That means in this case telling the story of Max Weber's political bureaucracy as it was taken up by Schmitt, Strauss, Baron, and Adorno, before introducing a nascent “rhetorical” thread in Weber's famous analysis of charisma. Methodologically, chapter 1 also introduces the philosophical work of Robert Brandom. Like Brandom's common law, concludes Marshall (312), “piecemeal” explication of concepts is both unavoidable in the everyday, and foundational for meaning itself. Concepts—including philosophical, rhetorical, theoretical, legal, and so on—don't unilaterally dictate their own meaning, nor are they delivered from on high or from authorities verbatim with meanings and extensions self-evident thereafter. Our job as interlocutors in particular fields and in everyday speech, then, is to take advantage of this cobbling dynamic with whatever skill we can muster—and indeed this will be the untapped potential of Marshall's book I will return to at the end.Chapter 2, like chapter 1, purports to offer the familiar but deceivingly so, because the pre-Weimar “Idioms of Rhetorical Inquiry” Marshall assembles won't be familiar to any but the specialized scholars of modern German rhetoric, and even for those few, familiar names like Gottsched, Sulzer, Novalis, Schlegel, Schopenhauer, Baumgarten, Kleist, Nietzsche, and most importantly for what is to come Adam Müller, will appear fresh as their rhetorical idioms point in unanticipated directions, that is toward “topical sensitization” (326) that multiplies the contours of a perception field we can productively discern and then navigate at any given moment. To that end, chapter 2 subheadings organize points of ongoing interest: topical surveying, specifications of context, the shift of trope (that bends or reconfigures a perception field), orientation to belief. Finally, Müller, as it turns out, emerges as an unlikely star of the story because his much-maligned liberal indecisionism turns out to be, for Marshall and his later critics including Benjamin, the surprising name for rhetorical virtue in parademocratic times: a name that is better known conceptually as “freedom” (e.g., 210). How does Marshall get there with his surprising start in Heidegger, who grounds the core chapters?Chapter 3, “Heideggerian Foundations,” sets the daunting task of locating foundations for this kind of political freedom in one of its avowed archenemies. The trick, as it turns out, is to make the Brandom-inspired case for Heideggerian foundations that offered multiple ways forward, some of which he took himself toward Nazism first, and then finally toward a wayward critique of modernity and its “total mobilization” (118). At the same time other ways forward—that Heidegger might have marked out himself smartly but inadvertently and without any intention of following himself—could point in different and even contrary directions still indebted, nevertheless, to their Heideggerian origins. Methodologically, this is one of Marshall's important points: it is a task of the intellectual historian to identify in retrospect, and to take seriously, possibilities that could be articulated only after the fact. But it would be wrong to think that this scholarly task is to read against the grain. Or to read symptomatically. Or to in any way read at a distance from the manifest material we have on hand. Instead, ideally this type of intellectual history reads thoroughly across the entire oeuvre (which in the case of Heidegger now runs to over one hundred volumes in the Gesamtausgabe), in the original languages, and in the rich local contexts that produce the work in its manifest not just its latent qualities. Real possibilities must be legible in the origins themselves. Through this process Marshall is particularly attentive to early Heidegger, and especially his Summer Semester 1924 course on Aristotle's Rhetoric Book II focusing on the emotions. For it is in these lectures that Marshall can most readily identify the “intimate connection between rhetoric and core elements in the Heideggerian philosophical project,” most importantly the foundational role emotions play in the space and time of appearance. “For Heidegger,” Marshall summarizes, “neither time nor space were prior to motion. In fact, time and space were produced by motions, the differentials among motions, and by the articulation of those differentials. This contention established ‘situatedness’ (Befindlichkeit) as the first—rhetorical—task of all presencing” (117). However, as Marshall tells the story, Heidegger himself then follows motion-as-dunamis toward a totalizing critique of modernity without realizing a possibility that would become manifest only later in one of his star students from those Marburg years, Hannah Arendt.In chapter 4, “Hannah Arendt and the Rhetorical Constitution of Space,” Marshall himself pursues this possibility but unavoidably from a point beyond Arendt herself: “The historian of thought qua thinker has something like a duty to continue the line of inquiry that could have been but was not” (130). In this case, that means on the one hand highlighting how Arendt took plausible but unexpected turns: Heidegger on emotion became Arendt on love (131). Heidegger's analysis of Augustinian caritas—or mutual care across all creatures fallen from God—turned toward an equidistance Heidegger would never have seen favorably because it would have smacked of a proto-mathematical that later makes human beings susceptible to the cynical calculations of modernity. But contrarily within the Augustinian concept of caritas as it was developed in Arendt's dissertation, “there was an equidistance from all creatures that articulated the beginning of a political theory of equality” (135). And similarly for Arendt “solidarity” (dilectio proximi) was a “rhetorical capacity to attend to possible [e]motions without immediately succumbing to them” (138). Next Rahel Varnhagen's public spheres, according to Arendt's rhetorical twist, are not legislated but performed (142). But as Marshall points out from his methodological standpoint, “rhetoric” in this case has some interesting documentary evidence in Arendt's oeuvre—for example her 1953 notes on Aristotle's Rhetoric (267)—while at the same time remaining essentially latent in Arendt's manifest work, where it awaits revision. And here, concludes Marshall, “we have a provisional answer to the conundrum of how Arendt could have overlooked rhetoric: she saw that the ‘everydayness of being-with-one-another’ was a proto-science of politics, but she did not see that rhetoric was the analytic of everydayness” (129). Indeed, seeing at the edges of the visible shows up with increasing prominence for Marshall, especially as he moves into his final two core chapters on Benjamin and Warburg.Chapter 5, “Walter Benjamin and the Rhetorical Construal of Indecision,” approaches oeuvre like previous chapters, tarrying first with Benjamin's early Trauerspiel book and its artistic means. For Benjamin in this work on Baroque aesthetics, highly conventional forms along with their minute variations didn't signal stasis but rather the opposite. Originating Benjamin's analytic frame in the Trauerspiel book, “rhetoric made available ‘artistic means’ that were themselves critical frames” (175). Again pointing ahead toward Warburg, Marshall sees in Benjamin a “veritable gymnasium of perspicacity” (180) and gesture (182), with Iago serving as the dubious example of this art perfected. But along with the eye and its uncertain exercises, Marshall also ties Benjamin back to the aforementioned Adam Müller, and his much-maligned art of rhetorical listening that ends in regrettable indecision, according to Schmitt. Here Benjamin's rhetorical trick, according to Marshall, is to see potential, especially in societies that do not possess the classical oratorical institutions (204). “Where Schmitt emphasized emergency, Benjamin was emphasizing emergence” (200). In Benjamin's purview, indecision is not so bad after all because it is precisely where freedom of thought appears. Finally, in chapter 6, “Warburgian Image Practices,” Marshall names “freedom” outright (210) and implicates Warburg plausibly in an argument broadly designed to set rhetoric-as-restitutio eloquentiae against the captivating strategies of an emerging antidemocratic figure like Mussolini (240). “On December 22, 1927, Warburg asked himself the following question: what aspects of the classical rhetorical tradition were implicit in the phrase restitutio eloquentiae? Style, pathos, ethos, and magnanimity, he responded” (241). But as Marshall makes sense of a classicizing gesture that has largely stumped previous critics in art history, this “restitution of eloquence” is precisely not the imposition of rule but it's opposite: “Warburgian magnanimity becomes something like a plasticity and thus potential adroitness of body-imaginative response” (208). Ornamentation becomes “a mode of and a fillip for freedom because it could be seen through, rerouted, and changed” (210).Finally after these core chapters and key figures, Marshall completes his project appropriately with chapter 7, “New Points of Departure in the Weimar Afterlife,” and chapter 8, “The Possibilities of Now.” And this is where we get the best sense for how Marshall understands his approach with respect to the field of rhetorical studies writ large; it is as well, appropriately, the place where one is obligated to find unrealized possibilities in Marshall's work itself. Why, ultimately, all these larger-than-life figures at the heart of Marshall's project? And what would keep “intellectual history” from detaching from a less glamorous everyday, where most of us spend most of our time? In a move that boldly defies everyday meaning, Marshall asks the reader to take up with him and his parade of critics a connoisseurship that should be, in principle, available to everyone. Given the context of this book, the admirable goal is to refine different types of awareness and action possibilities typically buried in the totalitarian, as it is broadly conceived by Arendt in her book of that name. Moreover, these types of everyday awarenesses need not be elite. “I am arguing,” concludes Marshall, “that the critical capacity announced by ‘distinguishing’ qua krinein and collected in the mode of everydayness may be specified by ‘connoisseurial’ but not with the narrow, elite, or conservative connotations usually accompanying that term” (283).A generous gesture. But without belaboring this concrete everydayness as it tends toward the mundane, we don't wind up knowing what nonelite connoisseurship looks like. Finally, I would like to suggest that this is precisely where Marshall's truly groundbreaking work in rhetoric and intellectual history inadvertently makes new room for the archival and ecological expansion, cultural histories, and pedagogical projects that have animated rhetorical studies in the past few decades. Perhaps, for instance, even students who barely register in the public sphere are themselves collecting in the mode of everydayness just as Marshall suggests, but does not pursue himself. As teachers and scholars, we could then be more attuned to how these practically anonymous modes of collection invent-toward-freedom, every day.

    doi:10.5325/philrhet.54.4.0421

November 2021

  1. Towards A Better Understanding Of The Complex Nature Of Written Corrective Feedback And Its Effects: A Duoethnographical Exploration Of Perceptions, Choices, And Outcomes.
    Abstract

    Despite a large body of research into the benefits of corrective feedback (i.e., teachers’ reactions to students’ incorrect use of the target language), little is known about how new and experienced second-language (L2) teachers supply feedback to writing and what factors guide their decisions. This paper is a collaborative effort of 1 teacher-educator and 4 graduate students to examine the process of providing written corrective feedback (WCF) to university-level L2 learners. Findings point to complexities involved in WCF provision and the importance of examining CF holistically, as preservice teachers’ corrective choices and learners’ responses to them are often interlinked. Acknowledgments: We are grateful to the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions. Any remaining errors are ours alone.

  2. Announcements
    doi:10.58680/rte202131479
  3. Announcements and Calls for Papers
    doi:10.58680/ce202131545

October 2021

  1. Editorial Board
    doi:10.1016/s1075-2935(21)00068-4
  2. From the Book and New Media Review Editor's Desk
    doi:10.25148/clj.16.1.010607
  3. Front Matter
    Abstract

    T he Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program sta .We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.We understand "community literacy" as including multiple domains for literacy work extending beyond mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations.It can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, gra ti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns.For us, literacy is de ned as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used.us, literacy makes reference not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well.Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.

    doi:10.25148/clj.16.1.010601