This essay examines high school poetry instruction in the 1920s and 1930s in light of the influence of Hughes Mearns, a teacher who wrote about and lectured on his experiences in teaching what he coined “creative writing” and who played a major role in reconceiving how teachers taught students to read and write poetry. Rather than focusing on memorization and recitation, Hughes enacted an experiential and “emotional” method of teaching students poetry. This student-centered approach reflected major thoughts in pedagogical progressivism of the period at the same time that it conflicted with the education tracking and standardization that also took shape under the name of progressivism. The innovative work of Mearns and teachers who embraced his philosophies is especially important to revisit given the analogies to our own period,where spoken-word programs, for example, exist alongside school standardization measures that often devalue poetry. Understanding the arguments Mearns and other teachers made for the unique value of poetry, as well as some of the shortcomings in their thought, can help educators to better articulate the need for K–12 poetry instruction now.

Culture as a research site and tool has been well established in the field of intercultural business and technical communication. In recent years, the perspective of culture as an ongoing process responding to contextual forces has been widely embraced in the field. Acknowledging the dynamic nature of culture helps communicators make contextual evaluations in intercultural business communication practices. While researchers strive to examine the dynamic nature of culture and contextual factors’ influence on culture and communication, little efforts has been made to examine the process of a cultural element’s generation, development, and transmission. To understand the notion of culture as a dynamic process for effective intercultural business and technical practices, it is necessary to conceptualize or describe how a cultural element or unit originates and develops along an evolutionary path. In this study, we focus on how the online meme serves as an empirically useful unit of culture, explore an online meme’s evolution process when it successfully transfers from an online marketplace to cultural space, and identify the qualities that constitute the success of the online meme.

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

Abstract This article considers the rhetoric of Phyllis Schlafly and her STOP ERA movement. Despite the early success and broad popularity of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, Schlafly and her colleagues were able to prevent its ratification. In their many clashes with proponents of the women’s liberation movement, these traditionalist women successfully appropriated and redeployed an ideographic argument that had been the province of their foes. Specifically, Schlafly claimed that traditional gender roles were freeing to women, ensuring their rights, while “liberation” could lead only to bondage. Drawing on the work of philosopher Isaiah Berlin, I argue that Schlafly’s upbeat, “positive” campaign advanced a “positive” conception of freedom against the “negative” freedom proposed by second-wave feminists. The success of this effort demonstrates the utility of such arguments, especially in a nation that values freedom as both opportunity and exercise. I close by suggesting that Schlafly’s rhetorical strategy has been embraced by subsequent conservative “culture war” movements, ensuring her legacy into the new millennium.

Abstract In 2008, two of the leading presidential candidates emerged from controversial, outsider religious groups—Mormonism and the black church tradition. Dogged by ongoing questions from the media, each candidate produced a high-profile public address. In this article, I argue that Mitt Romney’s “Faith in America” and Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” craft competing visions for American civic piety. Drawing on recent literature in the area of practical piety, I read the speeches as evidence that civic piety may be more than a subordinating, pragmatic agreement between church and state. It may instead be read as a spiritually substantive space of cultural identity formation. I further conclude that the 2008 election reveals a contested piety in the midst of transition, and that this transition points in a relatively well-defined direction for American civil-religious culture.

ABSTRACTThe problem St. Augustine confronts in the Confessions is fundamentally one of rhetoric: God should be singularly desirable, yet rhetoric seems necessary to motivate our pursuit of him. Religion participates in the relative marketplace of rhetoric, where ideals need to be authorized because they lack a self-sufficient rationale. In his early encounters with Cicero and the Platonists, Augustine struggles to renounce all such partial ideals in order to pursue philosophical truth unequivocally. Yet the refusal of rhetoric is, paradoxically, another willed ideal authorized by its own rhetoric. Augustine ultimately escapes rhetoric in the conversion scene by demonstrating his inescapable subjection to it; in doing so, he surrenders his will in such a way as to permit God's grace to operate through him. His conversion ultimately results from this inverted humiliation, which forces Augustine to abdicate his ascetic efforts and pretensions.

Analysis of food from its production side is still a comparatively rare topic in rhetorical studies. By analyzing how radical rhetorics in food- and agriculture-related discourses enable economic and political disparities between African-American and Caucasian farmers, this article reveals how such discourses have affected the U.S. public’s understanding of the federal government’s farm subsidy programs.

English studies must confront and develop strategies to account for scholars’ and students’ unfamiliarity with geography and its precepts, or “immappancy.” This article explores the problems presented by immappancy, traces its consequences for scholarly rhetoric, and proposes two pedagogical models that can help us develop our students’ geographical knowledge.

This article examines the historical professional project that created the Institute of Radio Engineers’ Professional Group on Engineering Writing an Speech (IRE PGEWS)—now called the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Professional Communication Society (IEEE PCS)—and recounts the group’s early history in detail. It also traces the career and recovers the professional contributions of the main organizer of PGEWS: Eleanor M. McElwee (1924–2008). The formation of PGEWS in 1957 was an intraoccupational strategy of inclusionary usurpation by “publications people” seeking to elevate their status within the engineering profession rather than attempting to build a separate profession of technical communication.

Some literacy scholars have embraced rooted cosmopolitanism as a framework for educating in today’s globalized and pluralistic world, where communicating across difference is an important individual and societal good. But how is the “cosmopolitan turn” in writing complicated by considering the religiosity of writing teachers and student writers? Is it possible for writing instructors and student writers to stay rooted in their own faith traditions, while maintaining openness to other ethical vantage points? What new questions are raised for cosmopolitan-minded writing pedagogy by these considerations? Through portraiture, we present complex pictures of how an American evangelical Christian teacher, Sam, and one of his evangelical Christian students, Charlie, engaged with a writing unit focused on “This I Believe” essay writing. The portraitures suggest that Sam, a more cosmopolitan evangelical, envisioned the unit as an invitation to (a) articulate one’s own beliefs in the wide universe of moral possibility and (b) get used to the beliefs of others who are ethically different from oneself. Charlie, on the other hand, conceptualized the unit’s writing, listening, and reading tasks as ways of honoring God and letting God speak through his literate practices. Our interpretation suggests that his populist evangelical faith made it difficult for him to openly engage in cosmopolitan dialogue across ethical difference. We hope our portraits of Sam and Charlie might move scholars interested in writing, literacy education, and rooted cosmopolitanism to engage themselves with the challenges and possibilities opened up when students’ and teachers’ religious roots are taken seriously.

Article for LiCS special issue The New Activism: Composition, Literacy Studies, and Politics.

“The editors of Present Tense are pleased to announce a new issue focused on a range of topics, from race and law to the politics of higher education. Volume 4.2 includes articles that explore rhetoric as it exists in many different places, especially as it is employed by disempowered and disenfranchised groups in politically contested locations.”

Abstract At the outset of the 2012 presidential race, Republican candidate Mitt Romney touted his private sector leadership of the private equity firm Bain Capital. As this election unfolded, Romney’s Bain Capital story became less of a narrative he could run on and more of a narrative he had to run from. Why did this Bain Capital story, a story about someone’s success in the free marketplace in a society that seemingly values such success, become so troubling for the Romney campaign? This question constitutes the centerpiece of the present essay. In addressing this question, we argue that the Bain Capital narrative’s role in the 2012 presidential race divulges a great deal about the fundamental nature of economic discourse in American democracy. Specifically, we contend that the economic narratives circulating in American democracy actually construct a tale of two economies—a tangible economy and a speculative economy. Unfortunately for Romney, his Bain Capital narrative situated him on the wrong side of this economic divide.

Pidgin, the Creole identified with “Local” culture in Hawaii, is seldom discussed in terms of its connection to the Hawaiian language and the ways it affirms Native identity.—Using Indigenous rhetorics and language politics as frames, I articulate Native Hawaiians’ adoption of Pidgin as acts of Ellen Cushman’s cultural perseverance and Scott Richard—Lyons’s rhetorical sovereignty. Using the poem “The Question,” written in Pidgin by Hawaiian poet Noelle Kahanu as an example of Indigenous rhetoric, I discuss how teaching—it through this lens, compared to a minority rhetoric lens, captures different histories and experiences and engenders critical awareness of the identities students perform.

The renewed interest in personal essays in composition complicates the contested, tricky personal identity negotiations for students and faculty in first-year writing, particularly in manifestations and representations of the body in both the classroom and writing spaces. This is especially complex for minority subjects, including queer students and faculty. Such collections as The Teacher’s Body (edited by Freedman and Holmes) and Professions of Desire (edited by Haggerty and Zimmerman) explore the pedagogical underpinnings of the body, and Ellis Hanson’s essay in the Gay Shame collection (2009) further complicates and interrogates the ways queer bodies are represented and problematized in the classroom. This article explores our own experiences in first-year writing: as students within a mind/body binary exploring through the scaffolding of composition, and as faculty who are increasingly exposed through our body projections in the classroom and depictions of our body and sexuality in an increasingly savvy media in which Google, Facebook, and social networking sites create matrices of identifications and disidentifications that inform our classroom experiences. The article traces the ways our bodies are aligned with cultural norms, and the ways that first-year writing complicates, contests, reifies, or disrupts these norms—for both students and faculty.

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

In this essay, two poets who have taught language learners in the United States and abroad argue for the use of personal writing, preferably poetry from students’ home cultures, as a bridge to writing in academic genres.

Reviewed are: From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957–1974 David Fleming Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post–Civil Rights Era Steve Lamos Retention and Resistance: Writing Instruction and Students Who Leave Pegeen Reichert Powell Rhetoric of Respect: Recognizing Change at a Community Writing Center Tiffany Rousculp Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times Patrick W. Berry, Gail E. Hawisher, and Cynthia L. Selfe

Abstract In systems of meaning that run on a regular setting, allegory is about filling in the blanks that disclose the “other story.” In the modern setting that Walter Benjamin tracked (back to the seventeenth century), allegory must turn significance out of the blank itself, working the blank as a turning point for drawing the reading onward. The “psy-fi” genre is the hub where bona fide science fictions, documentations of psychosis (memoirs and psychiatric and psychoanalytic studies), and tracts on mass psychology or psychological warfare, meet and cross over toward the evolution of new norms. Is it possible to construe a series of references in works of the “psy-fi” genre to Zeno's paradox of a con-test involving human and animal subjects as allegory of the test situation in which blanks secure the last or new step, which ultimately is taken toward mourning, the final frontier? Yes.

An emerging area of interest for composition and rhetoric researchers concerns southern women’s rhetorical education and practices as a spate of new publications suggest, including Kimberly Harriso...

Technical communication's attempt to prioritize theories of scholarship and pedagogy has resulted in several authors contributing a three-dimensional framework to approach technology: the instrumental perspective, the critical humanist perspective, and the user-centered perspective [1–3]. This article traces connections between this framework for technical communication and the philosophies of Michel de Certeau [4] and Andrew Feenberg [5], suggesting that the primary connection is a turn toward “rhetoric” as a mediator between scientific and philosophical communication. The article concludes that the current paradigm for understanding technology can be best understood by exploring three conjoined, yet competing, mentalities between a scientific, philosophical, and rhetorical worldview. While this three-dimensional approach provides a strong foundation for technical communication pedagogy and scholarship, it should continue to be re-examined for potential anomalies as the field continues to develop an identity.

Abstract This essay maintains that the intensive anger that scholars have dismissed in Margaret Sanger’s The Woman Rebel functioned rhetorically to redefine morality in the Progressive Era. After advancing a theory of angry rhetoric as a public moral emotion, I offer a reading strategy of emotional adherence to track anger’s diffuse discursive power in The Woman Rebel. The angry rhetoric of The Woman Rebel not only laid a new cultural ideal for the morality of contraception, it also constituted a militant identity for those oriented by their anger at The Woman Rebel’s suppression and Sanger’s criminal indictments. This essay closes by meditating upon the lasting role that anger has played in energizing the International Planned Parenthood Federation over the past 60 years.

Challenging histories of male-dominated composition instruction during the nineteenth century, this article recovers composition practices at the Cherokee National Female Seminary, locating the practices at the intersections of gender, race, and colonization. Through Indigenous storytelling and archival research methods, the author asserts that our cultural locations landscape our writing histories.

This article argues that many methodological approaches used in intercultural technical communication research are limited in addressing emerging social justice challenges in many post-colonial, developing, and unenfranchised/disenfranchised cultural sites, where professional communicators have begun conducting research. It offers decolonial approaches as an alternative by highlighting how these approaches are used in an intercultural research that investigates attempts to localize communication that accompanies sexuo-pharmaceuticals from one cultural context to another. The article also discusses some the challenges and benefits of such approaches. The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remain a powerfully remembered history for many of the world's colonized peoples. It is a history that still offends the deepest sense of our humanity [1, p. 1]. Global research raises many methodological and ethical challenges for technical communicators … because of the cross-cultural, international, and transnational nature of the work [2, p. 283].

Our fields need stories that are unwelcome—stories that bother us because we have not fully embraced the notions that our identities matter in our scholarship, our teaching, and our lives. We also need to embrace the multifaceted, intersectional nature of identity, and we need new strategies for engaging in cross-boundary discourses. I offer a queer reading of the work of three African American rhetoricians to explicate three concepts that are critical for engaging in responsible cross-boundary discourse as well as three trajectories for moving forward.

Reviewed are: Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres Tracey Bowen and Carl Whithaus, eds. Redesigning Composition for Multilingual Realities Jay Jordan First Semester: Graduate Students, Teaching Writing, and the Challenge of Middle Ground Jessica Restaino

ABSTRACTIndigenous to North and Central America, the coyote has been revered in the stories of native tribes, trapped by ranchers, and detonated in Saturday morning cartoons. Recently, the coyote has assumed the role of “patroller” in downtown Chicago. This article considers how the coyotes in Chicago decenter and disrupt the logics of rhetoric, in which leads to an encounter with animal rhetorics that are not solely produced by the human animal. The coyotes' play of “sniffication,” not only ruptures the logics of a center but also the anthropocentric system the center was a part of, an anthropocentric structure that attempts to keep rhetoric confined within the sphere of human animals. The texts surrounding the coyotes reveal the unfixed notion of a marginalized being who challenges structural and rhetorical norms.

The author claims that dual enrollment programs are here to stay and that collaboration and shared equity will allow these programs to continue to improve.

In recent decades, academic outcomes for English Language Learners (ELLs) have become a major focal point of research in English education. Much of the scholarly discourse on this topic reinforces a deficit orientation toward ELLs, constructing them as an educational “problem” rather than an asset (e.g., Crumpler, Handsfield, & Dean, 2011; Gutiérrez & Orellana, 2006; Mitchell, 2013). This article examines how ELLs at one high school in New England perceived and resisted this deficit discourse by analyzing statements these students made during public protest and personal interviews. I employ Critical Race Theory (Kubota & Lin, 2006; Ladson-Billings, 1998; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) as a framework for understanding how these students—all Black, former refugees from African countries—experienced the effects of deficit discourse in their lived experience at school and in the community. Focusing on four themes—Essentialization, Educational Deficit, Intellectual Inferiority, and Resistance—I show how students came to link deficit discourse with limited educational opportunity, and how particular schooling practices—such as language/literacy testing and academic tracking into low-level English classes—came to be seen by students as an outgrowth and reinforcement of deficit discourse. In the discussion of findings, I highlight alternative forms of representation (i.e., “counter-stories”) that were put forth by the students, and outline a number of implications of this study for teaching, research, and advocacy in English education.

“racism is an ongoing discourse that both gives rise to and emerges from many rhetorical moments—it is a continuous force requiring continuous opposition. The discourses of racism are as much visual as they are textual and oral”

Over the last two decades, a growing body of scholarship has examined how whiteness is socially constructed as “objective” and “neutral” in the US and elsewhere. This article seeks to trouble such a position for white teachers in the multiracial classroom, particularly those that focus on multiethnic literatures. Drawing upon scholarship in critical whiteness studies, personal experiences with students, and reflections on multicultural literature, this article advances an educational philosophy of investment wherein privilege and subjectivity are made legible in the learning process. In this model, educators and students work toward the discomfort that often comes from recognizing the risks and rewards of acknowledging one’s positioning within a racial order.

Previous scholarship in literacy and composition has noted the importance and function of ancestors in the literacy and rhetorical practices of descendants. However, such research has not explored how ancestorship functions for people at the marginalized intersection of racialized otherness and queer sexualities and genders. This article offers one response to this gap by reporting on the role of literacy in the life stories of sixty Black queer people residing in various regions across the United States who named historical erasure as a particularly detrimental form of oppression enacted by, though subverted through, literacy. An analysis of participants' uses of literacy to navigate historical erasure reveals that as participants encounter historical erasure, they disrupt its negative impact through four patterns of ancestorship: (1) literacy is used to create, discover, and affirm relationships to ancestors; (2) ancestors model the multiplicity of identities as a category of rhetorical analysis; (3) descendants’ identity formation/affirmation is affected by an ancestors’ writing and lives; and (4) descendants receive cross-generational mandates to become ancestors through literacy. Further, while African American literacies and LGBTQ literacies have each emerged as potent areas of scholarship in literacy and composition studies, the absence of a sustained and substantive discussion at the intersection of both areas contributes to a larger critical vacuum in rhetoric and composition in which we have overlooked the literacy and composition practices shaped at the intersection of race and queerness. This article begins to address this oversight through an in-depth exploration of a specific literacy and rhetorical practice among Black LGBTQ people.

Abstract This essay examines the 1959 controversy over whether and how to commemorate the centennial of abolitionist John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. I argue that the controversy arose because commemorating Brown’s raid challenged prominent U.S. public memories of the Civil War that excluded slavery and the continued existence of white supremacy. I analyze the discursive fields into which the centennial commemoration entered: the heroic, patriotic, and unifying narratives of the war championed by the national organizations tasked with commemorating the Civil War centennial, and discourses of the civil rights movement and the black press that demanded a repudiation of white supremacy and the recognition of African Americans as equal citizens. Ultimately, I contend that the rhetoric that surrounded the Harpers Ferry raid commemoration sheds light on how the civil rights movement not only challenged white supremacy in its conservative form, but also pushed against the moderate and liberal manifestations of white supremacy that were embedded in the commemoration of the Harpers Ferry raid.

ABSTRACTThough popular in the nineteenth century and widespread since, the elements of the hoax form can be traced to the origins of rhetorical theorizing, principally in the strategies of probability and counterprobability developed by the early orators and sophists. This article begins by defining features of the hoax as a textual event and then describes how hoaxes use traditional rhetorical techniques of both probability and improbability to transport viewers from credulity and acceptance to doubt and disbelief, demonstrating technical mastery over rhetorical conventions of the genre to mock their targets and to entertain and instruct their audience.

Writing Assessment in the 21st Century: Essays in Honor of Edward M. White Norbert Elliot and Les Perelman, eds. Race and Writing Assessment Asao B. Inoue and Mya Poe, eds. Writing Assessment and the Revolution in Digital Texts and Technologies Michael R. Neal Digital Writing: Assessment and Evaluation Heidi A. McKee and Danielle Nicole DeVoss, eds.

The article traces ideas of improvisation in Quintilian’s rhetorical work, presents an interdisciplinary literature review of improvisation studies, and surveys modern disciplines that teach improvisation, all with the goal of implementing these ideas into a first-year, college-writing pedagogy.

In this essay, I propose that literacy scholars who are parents, such as myself, rarely discuss how the choices we make in the education of our children sometimes conflict with our ideals as literacy researchers and problematize our praxis as scholars committed to social justice. I share examples from my own experience as a White, middle-class parent of children in an urban school district to demonstrate how my scholarship, advocacy for educational equity, and decisions about my children’s education are intertwined in complex ways and sometimes conflict. These examplesserve to illuminate the multiple, sometimes contradictory, ethical commitments many of us have—ethical commitments that are not always easy to reconcile. I argue that our work as literacyscholars would better serve our goals of educational equity if we balanced our ideals with honest conversations about the difficult decisions we make daily as we struggle to provide the besteducational opportunities for all children, including our own.

Archives have a long and troubled history as imperialist endeavors. Scholars of digital archives can begin to decolonize the archive by asking, how is knowledge imparted, in what media, by whom, and for what ends? Drawing on a six-year-long ethnohistorical study of Cherokee language and writing, I explore these questions and analyze the epistemological work of wampum, Sequoyan, and digital storytelling. I argue that decolonial digital archives have built into them the instrumental, historical, and cultural meanings of whatever media they include. To be understood in and on their terms, these media need to be contextualized within the notions of time, social practices, stories, and languages that lend them meaning.

This article describes the author’s development of a digital historical tool that collects and visualizes metadata on women’s pedagogical activities from the Progressive Era through the present. The tool, Metadata Mapping Project, offers a new take on historical mapping by focusing on the locatability of documents, subjects, and events, and by making it possible for users to trace activities that would otherwise occur as references in archival ephemera. Using one pedagogue as an example of how the database can work, this article also considers the implications of this and other tools for feminist rhetorical historiography, especially for constructing rhetorical ecologies that are not artifact based.

Writing studies has been an intellectual playground dominated by the “big kids.” If we are to understand how writing becomes “relevant” to children as children, then we must study them, not for who they are becoming, but for who they are in life spaces shared with other children. This essay on the methodology entailed in studying writing in young school children’s worlds rests on a cultural studies perspective on childhoods and plays with a sociocultural perspective on literacy development. The methodological challenges entail (a) researcher positionality that allows a dynamic, multilayered view of classroom contexts; (b) data collection decisions allowing one to trace the trajectories of official and unofficial (child-controlled) communicative practices and their interplay; (c) a socially embedded view of the semiotics and functionality of literacy; and (d) a global consciousness that constrains a long-standing rush to generalization based on observational studies of Western, often privileged children.

Reviewed are: Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-to-One Mentoring by Harry C. Denny. Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change edited by Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan. I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric by Frankie Condon. Logan A Teaching Subject: Composition since 1966, new ed. by Joseph Harris Language and Learning in the Digital Age by James Paul Gee and Elisabeth R. Hayes Contemporary Literature: The Basics by Suman Gupta The Changing of Knowledge in Composition: Contemporary Perspectives edited by Lance Massey and Richard C. Gebhardt

When, why, and how do college students come to value their writing as intellectual property? How do their conceptions of intellectual property reflect broader understandings and personal engagements with concepts of authorship, collaboration, identification, and capital? We address these questions based on findings from the Stanford Study of Writing, a five-year longitudinal cohort study that examined students’ writing, writing development, and attitudes toward writing throughout their college years and one year beyond. Drawing in particular from interview data, we trace relationships between students’ complex and creative negotiations with intellectual property and shaping tensions within the academy, arguing for renewed pedagogical approaches that affirm students’ writerly agency as consumers and producers of intellectual property.

In this review, I look back to the first issue of College English, and then across the years to trace the ways in which Intellectual Property (and this distinction from intellectual property is important) has been addressed by authors in the pages of the journal. I distinguish two periods of time marked by different approaches to IP issues, and conclude the review by drawing across the literature to situate implications, recommendations, and conclusions for the field to consider.

ABSTRACTThis article argues that the “linguistic turn” in analytic philosophy had a deep and significant impact on the development of Richard Rorty's pragmatism. One of the central features of the “linguistic turn” was its attention to the role of language in mediating questions of philosophy, and, in Rorty's hands, the “linguistic turn” drew philosophy very close to rhetorical theory. However, I argue that Rorty failed to engage or embrace rhetorical theory in any substantive way. This meant that his pragmatism cleaved philosophy off from the social democratic project. Such a separation of philosophy from the problems of maintaining and cultivating democracy abandons an important strand of first generation pragmatism. This amounts to a missed opportunity. By complimenting the linguistic turn with a robust account of the role of rhetoric in socio-political affairs, Rorty could have tied philosophy to social democracy in just the manner that Dewey had hoped. But instead Rorty is constrained by the tradition of philosophy and unable to make the “linguistic turn” into any kind of rhetorical turn.

This study traces Renaissance and post-Renaissance technical writers' use of classical rhetoric in English instruction manuals on the sport of falconry. A study of the period's five prominent falconry manuals written by four authors—George Turberville, Simon Latham, Edmund Bert, and Richard Blome—reveals these technical writers' conscious use of classical rhetoric as an important technique to persuade readers to accept these authors' authority and trust the information they were disseminating. These manuals employed several classical rhetorical techniques: invention by using ethos and several classical topics, classical arrangement, the plain style, and adaptation of the orator's duties. The explanation for this classical influence rests in the authors' own knowledge of classical rhetoric derived from sources such as Thomas Wilson, as well as the sources from whom these authors obtained their knowledge of falconry. The article ends by suggesting the origins through which these classical rhetorical techniques influenced the writing of the manuals.

In typical formulations, literacy studies embrace two more-or-less opposing positions: that of “many literacies” and that of dangerously low levels of literacy, their causes and their consequences. When conceptualized complexly—not the most common practice—their contradictory relationships form part of our subject of inquiry and part of the challenge for explication and explanation.