This study draws on the perceptions and experiences of upper-division students enrolled in writing-intensive (WI) classes in their majors at a large state university. During extended interviews, students reported confidence in dealing with the writing requirements of their majors and predicted success in future job-related writing situations. The primary bases for this confidence are their experiences with a significant number of WI assignments and their ability to engage a variety of resources and use the knowledge thereby obtained. Students particularly valued research-related writing assignments in the major as opportunities for professional skills development and identity building. The authors discuss findings as they relate to the ideologies of writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines. The authors argue for greater attention to students' readiness to make connections across assignments, courses, and disciplines; they also suggest greater attention to a field's inquiry methods and strategies for solving problems.

Investigates how social class affects the educational narratives of working-class students—both their initial access to four-year institutions and their ability to persevere until they obtain bachelor’s degrees. Argues that a genuine concern with diversity should lead compositionists to question the selective functions of the academy and the role of composition in maintaining them.

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Shares freshman-composition students’ stories about portfolio assessment (interviewing students at length three times during the semester), to examine ways students understand portfolios, how portfolios work, and why sometimes they do not. Suggests concerns relevant to implementing department-wide competency portfolios. Argues that community colleges may be better situated than large universities to reap the benefits of portfolios.

Offers seven brief descriptions of class projects and assignments used successfully in writing classes of all sorts, from first-year composition classes to business communication to computerized writing labs.

Robert Scholes. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Pp. Xiv + 203. Sharon Crowley. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1998. Xi + 306 pages. W. Ross Winterowd. The English Department: A Personal and Institutional History. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998. Xii + 261. Molly Meijer Wertheimer, ed. Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. 408 pages. $47.50 cloth; $24.95 paper. Mary Lynch Kennedy, ed. Theorizing Composition: A Critical Sourcebook of Theory and Scholarship in Contemporary Composition Studies. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1998. 405 pages. John Schilb. Between the Lines: Relating Composition Theory and Literary Theory. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1996. Xv + 247. Hephzibah Roskelly and Kate Ronald. Reason to Believe: Romanticism, Pragmatism, and The Teaching of Writing. Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 1998. xiv + 187 pages. Thomas Newkirk. The Performance of Self in Student Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 1997. xiii + 107 pages. Kay Halasek. A Pedagogy of Possibility: Bakhtinian Perspectives on Composition Studies. Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. 223 pages.

Since classical times, rhetorical education has been concerned with training in the civic functions of discourse-with young people to talk about public issues responsibly and articulately. And unsurprisingly, those who study and teach rhetoric have often faced public scrutiny and have been compelled to defend their pedagogical and philosophical views. One current battle over the public function of rhetorical education centers on the politically charged writing pedagogies that emerged in our discipline during the early 1990s. These approaches, commonly dubbed radical teaching or teaching, and whose most prominent advocates include James Berlin (Rhetoric), Patricia Bizzell (Academic), Susan Jarratt (Feminism), and Mary Louise Pratt (Arts), reject the notion that college writing courses should be ideologically neutral spaces dedicated to nurturing students' individual expression. Rather, these scholars hold, rhetorical instruction should prepare to deal critically with the arguments they encounter in the dominant culture and empower them to produce texts that resist those values. And thus, they argue, writing instructors have an obligation to cultivate in an appreciation for progressive political values, a sensitivity to injustice, and an ability to debate divisive issues-skills best developed through confrontational classroom exchanges. The range of practices these scholars advocate includes asking to engage with texts written from perspectives vastly different from their own (Bizzell, Academic 283-84), to debate heated questions in class (Jarratt 118-19), and to adopt a critical stanceoften the teacher's own-toward mainstream ideologies (Berlin, Rhetoric 3637). Yet despite its lofty goals, critical has faced criticism on multiple grounds. Opponents like Maxine Hairston decry the very goals of such pedagogy, charging that it puts dogma before diversity, politics before craft, ideology before critical thinking, and the social goals of the teacher before the educational needs of the students (Diversity 180). More recently, Stephen

Marjorie Roemer, Lucille M. Schultz, Russel K. Durst, Reframing the Great Debate on First-Year Writing, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 50, No. 3, A Usable Past: CCC at 50: Part 1 (Feb., 1999), pp. 377-392

A though there was a hiatus of several decades in the early part of the Twentieth Century in which little work was done on the rhetoric of the early Church, there has been a healthy revival of interest in the subject and the number of studies is growing rapidly. Robert Grant's Greek Apologists of the Second Century, Averil Cameron's Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, Peter Brown's The Body and Society and Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity, Harry Gamble's Books and Readers in the Early Church, George Kennedy's Greek Rhetoric Under Christian Emperors, William Schoedel's Philosophy and Rhetoric in the Adversus Haereses of and Pheme Perkins' Ireneus and the Gnostics: Rhetoric and Composition in Adversus Haereses Book One represent only a very limited listing of recent work. Some of these works present studies of relatively long sweeps of time (Cameron, Brown, Gamble, Kennedy), while others focus on restricted time frames (Grant) or individuals (Schoedel, Perkins). I come to this body of scholarship not as an historian but as a rhetorical theorist interested in studying the rhetoric practiced by leaders within orthodoxies. The development of the early Church and the rhetoric used by those instrumental in its formation provide an excellent case study from which characteristics of such rhetoric can be gleaned and used to explain the formation of orthodoxies in our own day. A typical episode in the rhetoric of orthodoxy is to identify those who appear to be legitimate insiders, but are not, and to expose them as alien. In the last quarter of the Second Century C.E., Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, wrote an extended treatise, consisting of five books, titled Adversus Haereses, commonly titled Against Heresies in English and abbreviated as AH. 1 The purpose of this work, he says, is to protect the sheep from certain men who outwardly are covered with sheep's clothing (Irenaeus AH I, Preface, 2). The first book contains a summary of the tenets of various heretical sects, the second consists of arguments, based on reason, that destroy the validity of these heretical doctrines, and the three remaining books set forth the doctrines of the orthodox faith in contrast with the teachings of the heretics. My present objective is to investigate the rhetorical strategies employed by Irenaeus and in so doing to describe a theory of rhetorical expose. Because Against Heresies is quite long and because much of the expose portion of the work is in Book I, I have restricted my analysis primarily to that book.

This article describes an assessment carried out in collaboration with the administrators of a large freshman English course. The assessment team worked with instructors to identify course goals and to design tasks that the instructors felt would fairly assess the extent to which the students achieved the goals. Students who did and did not take the course were both pre- and posttested on five central goals: critical reading, argument identification, differentiation of summary and paraphrase, understanding of key terms used in the course, and practical strategies for writing academic papers. Results of the assessment failed to indicate any substantial improvement on any of the five course goals for students who took the course. These results contrasted with positive outcomes obtained by the same assessment team with introductory history and statistics courses. The article concludes with reflections on why instructors may fail to recognize that their courses are not working.

In an Internet posting a few years ago, a former writing teacher, having abandoned the academic life in order to raise Arabian horses, observed that the process of teaching college writing was similar in many ways to the enterprise of "dressage," a term that refers to the guiding of a horse through a series of complex maneuvers by slight movements of the hands, legs, and weight. In particular, he noted the following:

Describes how the author uses the off-campus interview of a working professional as a foundation unit upon which to launch a first-year college writing course. Discusses teaching strategies to prepare for this real interview, and notes that the working professionals interviewed can become the writing instructor’s best ally in motivating first-year college students.

Describes an intermediate college writing class that uses Paulo Freire’s essay “The Banking Concept of Education” as its philosophical foundation to encourage students and teachers to engage in critical thought, critical writing, and critical action. Describes several assignments that evolved from the essay, and its implications. Shows how students experienced writing as “critical action.”

Ttives of the teaching of writing in United States colleges have inevitably excluded or simplified moments and facets of history in the service of asserting order within their comprehensiveness. While no curricular history means to include references to all the composition activity going on in the country, their representational figures, both professors and colleges, often present cases which ought to be understood as demographically, ethnically, or racially limiting. One striking absence from the broad histories of writing instruction in English and across the curriculum in American colleges is the composition instruction done at historically black colleges and universities (HBCU). On the other hand, the history of African American higher education has itself generated a vast literature, including chronicles of Howard University, Fisk University, Tuskegee Institute, and Atlanta University, many journals, including the Journal of Negro Education, as well as countless articles, scholarly books, and textbooks written by HBCU faculties, students, and alumni. This literature and its sources demonstrate that from the late

Describes a vocabulary activity the author uses in first-year composition classes which is effective, interesting, and fun for students who write an ongoing serialized short story with required vocabulary words chosen weekly from assigned student readings.

n their recent article on Importing Composition: Teaching and Researching Academic Writing Beyond North America, Mary N. Muchiri and her co-authors challenge our assumptions that composition is universal in its uses and applications, and that writing instructors and writing students do not occupy particular geographic locations. Muchiri et al. remind readers that composition is very much a product of North America and of capitalism and illustrate what happens to composition research when it is exported-how it changes in a different, de-localized context of its origination. Importing Composition highlights some of the assumptions that form the basis of U.S. research on academic writing-assumptions that sometimes seem bizarre in a new context (176). In our limited notions of

Describes how English faculty at a community college surveyed the needs of faculty in other disciplines regarding their writing requirements. Relates patterns that emerged and describes changes made in the English 101 course, including a summary/reaction assignment based on a bibliographic resource. Notes positive comments from students and faculty about the benefits of this assignment.

Details a first-year college composition course that blends journalism instruction with first-year composition. Describes how students learn about news gathering and news writing techniques common to feature writing and complete a profile writing project which encourages a level of discourse that bears closer kinship to everyday workplace writing. Discusses course design, implementation, and evaluation.

Compares 20 years of teaching college writing (and reading countless drafts of student papers) to an immigrant father’s working 40 years in the family store in Terre Haute, Indiana (and selling 350,000 coats).

Concentrates specifically on the experience of using “Maus” (a narrative in comic strip form) with one class which met in spring 1996, after the accidental killing of a Black child by a Hasidic Jew in Crown Heights, New York. Uses the text at Medgar Evers College in a freshman composition course which also functions as an introduction to literature. Describes the classroom dynamics.

SHORT REVIEWS Christopher Lyle Johnstone, Theory, Text, Context: Issues in Greek Rhetoric and Oratory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) 196 pp. In many ways, this collection of articles on Ancient Greek rhetoric in English offers the best of what contemporary historiography and rhetorical theory have to offer. Rather than reading texts in isolation, or presuming interpretive clarity, these articles interpret their objects in relationship to the social, political, and even physical circumstances that influenced their production. Taken together, they summarize much of what is new in ancient rhetoric. Christopher Lyle Johnstone introduces the collection by rehearsing current rhetorical historiography, attributing the term rhetorike to Plato but acknowledging the creative significance of a set of prototypical rhetorical conditions such as the rise of democratic institutions, the spread of literacy, and the concomitant transformation of mythos into logos which made abstract categorization possible. These social, political, and intellectual conditions nurtured rhetoric as a distinct discipline. Johnstone's perspective clearly differentiates this work from earlier creation narratives that attributed rhetoric to the spontaneous genius of specific individuals. Continuing this line of reasoning, the first article, one of Father Grimaldi's last, "How Do We Get from CoraxTisias to Plato-Aristotle in Greek Rhetorical Theory?" is an excellent overview of the sophists' contribution to the development of rhetoric, and thus a contribution to their ongoing rehabilitation. While Grimaldi acknowledges that his task is synthetic and therefore not highly original, the article is nevertheless thorough and cogent. The second article dedicated to sophistic origins, John Poulakos's "Extending and Correcting the Rhetorical Tradition: Aristotle's Perception of the Sophists" argues that Aristotle acknowledged the 227 RHETORICA 228 sophists for inaugurating the study of rhetoric but went to great lengths to correct the logical and linguistic inadequacies that were the inevitable result of their imperfect epistemology. Thus he concludes that Aristotle followed Plato insofar as he critiqued the sophists but "marked out an independent path", for himself by including their efforts as among those founding the rhetorical tradition. In the third piece on the place of sophistry within the tradition, Schiappa argues for what he calls a "predisciplinary approach" to the study of the sophists, by which he means avoiding "vocabulary and assumptions about discursive theories and practice imported from the fourth century when analyzing fifth-century texts" (p. 67). He makes the case for rigorous historiography by rereading Gorgias's Helen in such a way as to prove that it "advanced the art of written prose in general, and of argumentative composition in particular" (p. 78) while in no way succumbing to the tendency to perceive the sophistic piece as somehow indicative of the philosophy/rhetoric split which was an intellectual artifact of later developments. Leaving the sophists but remaining firmly within the realm of current theoretical issues, Michael C. Leff questions the general applicability of Dilip Goankar's assertion that contemporary rhetorical theory differs from ancient theory in that it is hermeneutic rather than performative and dubious about the possibility of human agency fully explaining rhetorical decisions. Leff reads Thucydides's account of the Mytilene disaster as evidence that the ancients were, or at least Thucydides was, aware of how rhetorical discourse could be shaped by circumstances beyond participants' control. Leff ends his argument, however, by asserting that Thucydides' observations were intended to have a therapeutic effect in that "The readers of History...become better equipped to assume the role of agent, for they are better able to interpret that role not just at the moment of action but also from within an understanding of history" (p. 96). Christopher Lyle Johnstone's own noteworthy contribution combines archaeology with acoustics to challenge one of the idols of traditional rhetorical history. Whereas we have always argued that deliberative rhetoric must have played an integral part in Athenian democracy, Johnstone points out that we have never taken into account the physical circumstances of delivery in the open spaces of the ancient agoras. The Pynx, in particular, he argues, was constructed such that even under ideal climatic conditions, perhaps only "half of the 5000 Reviews 229 present could understand what speakers were saying" (p. 126). If this compelling argument is true, then we need to...

Shows how some key postmodern ideas about texts forced a teacher and her students to rethink typical writing assignments and typical student responses. Describes the assignments and considers how they invite postmodern critique. Suggests giving up grandiose, romantic notions that Freshman Composition can fix students either personally or politically.

Contends that service learning--community service linked to academic courses--adds a valuable experiential dimension to composition classes. Describes service learning at Raritan Valley Community College where in composition it fits as an optional alternative for the research paper assignment that is the culminating course project. Discusses how projects are developed and implemented.

Offers suggestions for teaching dyslexic students from a graduate student who teaches composition and is himself dyslexic. Recommends the following strategies: one-on-one help, study skills assignments, individual strategies, step-by-step process, oral discussion, topics of interest to the student, and questions to build confidence.

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Discusses how to teach a first-year composition course, expository writing, required of most students at Rensselaer Polytechnic. Considers how to motivate students and help them to see connections between writing and their technical work. Offers various techniques for getting the students to write comfortably.

Recent discussions of teaching composition in the context of cultural studies have begun consider the condition of the writing subject in society, yet these discussions construct student-writer Subjects according modernist identity/difference binary oppositions that are politically problematic.1 The modernist Subject is defined in terms of its objective relationship reality and its opposition Other subjects, and the construction of the modernist Subject (autonomous and sovereign) is an effect of ethno-centric formulations (frames, constructions) of identity/difference oppositions.2 In Orientalism, for example, Edward Said describes how modernist European societies construct cultural differences not only as but also as opposite (the of the West is constructed in opposition the of the East). According Said, When one uses categories like Oriental and Western as both the starting and the end points of analysis, research, public policy, . . . the result is usually polarize the distinction-the Oriental becomes more Oriental, the Westerner more Western-and limit the human encounter between different cultures, traditions, and societies. The tendency, then, is to channel thought into a West or an East compartment (46), eliminating the possibility for common ground, agreement, understanding, or in more extreme cases, destroying the human capacity for tolerance of We cannot maintain oppositional notions of identity/difference without inevitably falling into a situation in which gains (or attempts gain) hegemonic control over difference. A few recent cultural theorists, on the other hand, do not view and as oppositional terms; instead, they construct identity and difference as a complementary pair, as an alliance rather than an opposition. And the subjectivities that result from this alliance refuse the structural closure of the modernist Subject and articulate themselves (engage in cultural and rhetorical practices) in the aporia between and Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida in particular deconstruct the unified structure of the sovereign and autonomous modernist Subject, positing in its place a space in the aporia between and where subjectivities construct themselves and each other. Throughout much of his work, Foucault is concerned with issues of and in the textual construction of subjectivities. Discursive

Last summer, I wrote a letter to editor of my local newspaper and coauthored a response to George Will's now-infamous assault on college writing instructional Big deal? Yes. And here's why: Like many composition instructors, I've been preoccupied for some time with what S. Michael Halloran once called the need for a revival of public discourse (246) and what 1995 Conference on College Composition and Communication called literacies, technologies, responsibilities. My response to these preoccupations has always been passive: I figured that I could best promote responsible practice of public literacies by enhancing my students' awareness of-and thus, I thought, their stake in-public issues. Unsure of whether I was actually accomplishing this, though, I decided to investigate whether there were indeed connections between students' classroom-initiated participation in literate behavior (e.g., writing, reading, and talking about issues) and their self-initiated participation in civic behavior, such as voting and writing letters to editor. To do so, I looked closely at several current issues-type writing textbooks and selected one that appeared to share my goals; I designed an attitudinal survey and a sequence of assignments; and I assembled a file of student writing samples. I'll discuss results of my study in more detail later in this essay, but for now, let me suggest that writing-about-issues texts that I examined (including America Now, one I eventually chose) do not particularly encourage students' participation in world beyond classroom, and may unwittingly repress it. And while this came as a great surprise to me, my students seemed aware of profound difference between writing about issues in class and acting on them (in writing or otherwise) outside of class. For example, in response to some end-of-semester assessment questions about America Now, one young woman, Laura G., wrote, Well, I'm not going to go join [G]reenpeace or storm White House or anything but, yes, reading some of these chapters really did [a]ffect my thinking. . . . Reading these articles caused me to speak out at times when I would have normally remained silent. I don't want to underestimate move from silence to speaking out, but I

The Lost Cause of Rhetoric: The Relation of Rhetoric and Geometry in Aristotle and Lacan by David Metzger. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1995. xvi; 135. Roman Rhetoric: Revolution and the Greek Influence by Richard Leo Enos. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1995; xii + 135pp. Nineteenth‐Century Women Learn to Write edited by Catherine Hobbs. Charlottesville and London, University of Virginia Press, 1995. 343 pp. Kenneth Burke and Contemporary European Thought edited by Bernard L. Brock. Tuscaloosa, U of Alabama P, 1995; xii; 279 pp. A Teacher's Introduction to Composition in the Rhetorical Tradition by W. Ross Winterowd & Jack Blum. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1994. A Teacher's Introduction to Postmodernism by Ray Linn Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996.

Offering an emancipatory response to the widening fissure between day-to-day experience and institutional conventionality, [Kurt] Spellmeyer [in Common Ground: Dialogue, Understanding, and the Teaching of Composition] concludes with ideal of classroom practice that maintains a balance of communicative that silences no one, teachers or students (22-23). If freshman paper, for instance, were seen as threshold between two distinct contexts of social life and meaning, teachers could stop serving as initiatory gate-keep[ers], barring the way to pollution by the 'nonacademic.' (Bloom 846) Spellmeyer's reported view, seemingly endorsed by reviewer Lynn Z. Bloom, is that to eschew gatekeeping-at least in first-year college writing courses-is utopian aim, but in the good sense: the shimmering ideal at the horizon of current practice, the thing to keep moving toward. Gatekeeping is all caught up in power imbalances, silencings, the imposition of one value system (the academic) on another and presumably more natural one-an imposition seen as part of misguided and perhaps even fetishistic concern for purity (and consequent anxiety over pollution). Compared to such practice, any ideal is better, even one that's bit pie-inthe-sky. Views like these are such commonplaces that they are rarely defended in detail, or even fully articulated. Bits of explication, however, lie here and there in any

The inquiry posed two basic research questions: a) Could changes in student writing be tied to conferencing, and b) Could the status of the student (weaker or stronger student, native or non-native speaker) or the type of writing course (general freshman composition or specialized genre-specific course) be tied to any systematic differences in the conferencing process or its outcome? This study tracked the discourses generated by 4 teachers around a set of their teacher-student writing conferences. They collected copies of first drafts, tapes of their conferences, and copies of subsequent drafts from one stronger and one weaker student, for a total of 8 students and 32 texts. All students revised their papers in ways indicating that the conference had had an effect on their revision process. The findings indicate that what is ostensibly the “same” treatment does not generate the same response from all students. They also indicate that the divergent backgrounds students bring to instructional events have a structuring effect that cannot be dismissed solely as teacher bias and self-fulfilling prophecy

Current scholarship indicates that most writing students read and make use of teachers’ written comments on their drafts and find some types of comments more helpful than others. But the research is unclear about which comments students find most useful and why. This article presents the results of a survey of 142 first- year college writing students’ perceptions about teacher comments on a writing sample. A 40-item questionnaire was used to investigate students’ reactions to three variables of teacher response: focus, specificity, and mode. The survey found that these college students seemed equally interested in getting responses on global matters of content, purpose, and organization as on local matters of sentence structure, wording, and correctness, but were wary of negative comments about ideas they had already expressed in their text. It also found that these students favored detailed commentary with specific and elaborated comments, but they did not like comments that sought to control their writing or that failed to provide helpful criticism for improving the writing. They most preferred comments that provided employed open questions, or included explanations that guided revision.

The essays in this book, stemming from a national conference of the same name, focus on the single subject required of nearly all college studentscomposition.Despite its pervasiveness and its significance, composition has an unstable status within the curriculum. Writing programs and writing faculty are besieged by academic, political, and financial concerns that have not been well understood or addressed.At many institutions, composition functions paradoxically as both the gateway to academic success and as the gatekeeper, reducing access to academic work and opportunity for those with limited facility in English. Although writing programs are expected to provide services that range from instruction in correct grammar to assistingor resistingpolitical correctness, expanding programs and shrinking faculty get caught in the crossfire. The bottom line becomes the firing line as forces outside the classroom determine funding and seek to define what composition should do.In search of that definition, the contributors ask and answer a series of specific and salient questions: What implicationsintellectual, political, and institutionalwill forces outside the classroom have on the quality and delivery of composition in the twenty-first century? How will faculty and administrators identify and address these issues? What policies and practices ought we propose for the century to come?This book features sixteen position papers by distinguished scholars and researchers in composition and rhetoric; most of the papers are followed by invited responses by other notable compositionists. In all, twenty-five contributors approach composition from a wide variety of contemporary perspectives: rhetorical, historical, social, cultural, political, intellectual, economic, structural, administrative, and developmental. They propose solutions applicable to pedagogy, research, graduate training of composition teachers, academic administration, and public and social policy. In a very real sense, then, this is the only book to offer a map to the future of composition.

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In Challenge of Diversity, H. Roy Kaplan, executive director of The National Conference of Christians and Jews, writes, Our obsession with or fear of differences has become a morbid fetish that threatens to tear our moral fabric apart (8). The article appeared in a weekly newspaper that covers arts, entertainment, and public issues in and around Tampa Bay area. The newspaper is also read-with varying degrees of attention-I discovered, by about two-thirds of my first-year composition students at University of South Florida. Although well intentioned, piece answers the of with a kind of laissez-faire pluralism: We must create an environment where people, all people, feel needed and wanted-part of a of caring and sharing human beings; where diversity, pluralism and differences are valued for richness and value they bring to human experiences (8). My students' offerings on cultural diversity and race relations bear striking resemblances to Kaplan's sentiment. At institutions with culturally diverse populations like South Florida, students often find it convenient and reassuring to believe in promise of a harmonious pluralism. Like Kaplan, many students believe that it is focus on and preoccupation with gender, racial, and class differences that is actually problem and not social and political dimensions of these differences. Certainly, in order to work for livable futures and in order to interrogate asymmetrical power formations in multicultural societies, we should envision difference as an asset and not a liability. However, we cannot create livable futures by simply ignoring real frictions and tensions created by unequal access to power and benefits of dominant culture. The answer to challenge of is not to imagine a community of caring and sharing human beings but to recognize our multicultural society as a tense plurality, as Joseph Harris says, and learn how to generate productive dialogue from tensions of difference. As evidenced above, students do not come to class ignorant of tensions

Composition's recent turn toward cultural studies a research methodology and a pedagogy grows out of an interest in imagining the democratic potentials of rhetoric.1 James Berlin had been one of the compositionists at the forefront of theorizing composition's uses of cultural studies. In Poststructuralism, Cultural Studies, and the Composition Classroom, for example, Berlin laid out the project of a cultural studies pedagogy, stating that must come to see that the languages they are expected to speak, write, and embrace ways of thinking and acting are never disinterested, always bringing with them strictures on the existent, the good, the possible, and regimes of power (24). Yet the roadblocks to such a project in composition in particular and cultural studies in general are that recognitions of the of language can also narrow the possibilities for transformative critical engagements. In the extreme, recognizing the structural interestedness of language, its claims on who we are and what we can do, generates only resignation and indifference. As Lester Faigley writes, the profound cynicism of many students concerning public responsibilities suggests to some the possibility that as society is increasingly saturated with ever expanding quantities of information, objects, and services, the space for the autonomous subject with a capacity for critical thought collapses (213). problem confronting compositionists working with cultural studies today is thus one of actualizing democratic opportunities anticipated in the critical study of cultural sign systems. What opportunities does cultural studies provide compositionists for critically reimagining their pedagogical and research responses to the interestedness of language practices? Our response is to say that cultural studies can offer critical redirections of the ideological motivations for contemporary rhetorics when it conceptualizes those rhetorics in terms of their civic settings. Berlin had already noted the significance of place to rhetoric in an earlier article on the historiography of rhetoric, where he remarked: The ability to read, write, and speak in accordance with the code sanctioned by a culture's ruling class is the main work of education, and this is true whether we are discussing ancient Athens or modern Detroit (52). What is most interesting for our purposes about Berlin's quotation is that he suggests

This article profiles a group of college students with learning disabilities, outlines strategies used to help those students in their 100-level expository-writing class, and illustrates persistent writing problems with three student writing samples.

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Although notions of literacy tend to be dominated by images of solitary readers and writers, collaboration and assistance with reading and writing are widespread practices. This article presents a detailed description of a scribe and his client in Mexico producing a letter through joint composition, a term used to refer to letter-writing episodes involving two or more active participants. Through an examination of the discussions that occurred between the scribe and the client, the analysis illustrates how both actors contributed to the final outcome. This article discusses how the participants negotiated their points of view and pooled their knowledge to produce a specific type of document in accordance with their expectations and purposes. The analysis suggests that joint composition is the outcome of multiple contextual elements: authority, gender, and literacy competency. It further concludes that scribing is a complex, heterogeneous literacy activity.

Alan W. France. Composition As a Cultural Practice. Westport, CN: Bergin and Garvey, 1994. 171 pages. Mark Wiley, Barbara Gleason, and Louise Wetherbee Phelps, editors. Composition in Four Keys: An Inquiry into the Field. Mountain Valley, California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1995. 608 pages. A. L. Becker. Beyond Translation: Essays in Modern Philology. University of Michigan Press, 1995. 431 + ix pages. Sherrie L. Grandin. Romancing Rhetorics: Social Expressivist Perspectives on the Teaching of Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 1995. 166 pages. Mike Rose. Possible Lives. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. 454 pages. $24.95. Richard McKeon. On Knowing—The Natural Sciences. Compiled by David B. Owen. Edited by David B. Owen and Zahava K. McKeon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 405 pages. $65.00 hardcover, $17.95 paper. Jasper Neel. Aristotle's Voice: Rhetoric, Theory and Writing in America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 259 pages. $24.95.

Abstract Aeschines and Athenian Politics by Edward M. Harris. New York: Oxford U P, 1995. Pp. x + 233. The Presidency and the Rhetoric of Foreign Crisis by Denise M. Bostdorff. Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 1994. Preface vii, 306 pp. The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume by Adam Potkay. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994; pp. 253. Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire by Peter Brown. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. 182 pages. Composition in Context: Essays in Honor of Donald C. Stewart. ed. W. Ross Winterowd and Vincent Gillespie. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois U P, 1994; xxxi; 266.

Instructors should learn both to celebrate and to accommodate gender differences in the writing classroom.