The overarching purpose of the study is to describe the English-reading development of Latino English learners who were members of the low reading group in a first-grade all- English classroom. Observations, interviews, multiple assessments, and case analyses were conducted.

lthough at first glance they might seem like strange companion texts, William Attaway's Blood on the Forge (1941) and Harriette Amow's The Dollmaker (1954) share key thematic elements pertaining to the experiences of migrants from rural Appalachia to multiethnic industrial centers of the urban north during the first half of the twentieth century. To be sure, there are substantial differences between the two texts. Blood on the Forge follows the lives of three male African American protagonists, brothers Melody, Chinatown, and Big Mat Moss, from a life of sharecropping in Kentucky to a steel-mill town resembling World War I-era Homestead, Pennsylvania. Recruited along with other black migrants as strikebreakers to a community whose largest block of laborers are Slavic immigrants, the Moss brothers soon find themselves pitted against their unionized white fellow workers. In addition to the double bind of marginalization from white labor unions and exploitation by industrial capitalists, the Moss brothers simultaneously must deal with pressing issues of familial and cultural dislocation. As I elaborate in this essay, Attaway marks these dislocations primarily through his accounts of the Moss brothers' encounters with radically new forms of labor and labor technology. Like many social realist novelists of his day, Attaway offers readers no idealized resolution to the Moss brothers' rather bleak dilemma. Rather, the novel's tragic conclusion finds Big Mat slain while work-

The impact of differing national and professional cultural backgrounds is a salient issue that interacts with technological support of distributed teams. As we prepare for the world of the future it becomes imperative that we give students the experience of working in multicultural distributed teams. In order to gain experience in this area, a project between ten teams of students from the City University of Hong Kong and the Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands was initiated. A variety of group support technologies, primarily Group Systems, were used to service the teams as they learned to work together. This paper documents experiences from the Hong Kong-Netherlands project. Eight out of ten student teams successfully concluded a seven-week exercise resulting in an integrated report related to software engineering. Data collected on the process are reported and discussed. Those student teams who succeeded were found to be particularly attuned and accommodating to aspects of national and professional culture.

Looks at two representative examples of the impact of multiculturalism on higher education in order to get a concrete sense of how different perspectives can affect understanding of the multicultural transformation of the college curriculum in general and English studies in particular. Notes that the emphasis on educational access should be on “geography of education.”

Abstract Much about the trope of irony is confusing. However, a consideration of the similarities between irony and African American Signification can help us recognize that this confusion can empower rhetors. One rhetor who can illustrate this power is Fanny Fern, a white nineteenth‐century American newspaper columnist whose rhetoric could be described as Signification. Simultaneously praising and condemning subjects such as suffrage, Fern was able to write on subjects forbidden to many. In addition, Fern's use of Signifyin(g) ironic rhetoric illustrates that language is not as determined as many would believe.

Traces of a offers a unique scholarly perspective that merges interests in rhetorical and literacy studies, United States social and political theory, and African American women writers. Focusing on elite nineteenth-century African American women who formed a new class of women well positioned to use language with consequence, Royster uses interdisciplinary perspectives (literature, history, feminist studies, African American studies, psychology, art, sociology, economics) to present a well-textured rhetorical analysis of the literate practices of these women. With a shift in educational opportunity after the Civil War, African American women gained access to higher education and received formal training in rhetoric and writing. By the end of the nineteenth-century, significant numbers of African American women operated actively in many public arenas.In her study, Royster acknowledges the persistence of disempowering forces in the lives of African American women and their equal perseverance against these forces. Amid these conditions, Royster views the acquisition of literacy as a dynamic moment for African American women, not only in terms of their use of written language to satisfy their general needs for agency and authority, but also to fulfill socio-political purposes as well.Traces of a Stream is a showcase for nineteenth-century African American women, and particularly elite women, as a group of writers who are currently underrepresented in rhetorical scholarship. Royster has formulated both an analytical theory and an ideological perspective that are useful in gaining a more generative understanding of literate practices as a whole and the practices of African American women in particular. Royster tells a tale of rhetorical prowess, calling for alternative ways of seeing, reading, and rendering scholarship as she seeks to establish a more suitable place for the contributions and achievements of African American women writers.

130 RHETORICA tion. Fascicule I incorrectly refers to Peter of Blois's dictaminal treatise as an abridgement of work by Bernard of Meting (p. xxxv). An appendix contains the edition of an allegorical letter from Simon O.'s Summa dictandi which concerns the authorship of Regina sedens Rhetorica . A useful Glossary of Medieval Words and Unusual Spellings with ref­ erences to standard Medieval Latin dictionaries is followed by a list of cited manuscripts, editions of primary texts, cited secondary sources, and a full and accurate index. A copy of this book should be found in the library of every student of the ars dictaminis. Emil J. Polak Queensborough Community College, The City University ofNew York Kathleen Welch, Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1999) xvii + 255 pp. The dust jacket of Electric Rhetoric sports a blurb from Andrea Lunsford which praises an author who "re-theorizes (and re-races, re-genders, and re­ performs) pre-Aristotelian rhetoric and then uses it to explore posthumanist literacy and rhetoric in a range of electronic spaces. In its insistent rejection of what Welch calls the 'worst' of Enlightenment, Modernist, and Postmod­ ernist values—and in its bold program for change—this book is going to make a lot of people nervous. A must read!" I open with Lunsford's remarks because they are as illuminating for what they say as for what they do not say. Welch's book is not a "program" but a polemic for change which, by the author's own avowal, seeks to "redirect inquiry" and raise more questions than it answers (p. 9). Welch does so handily in six chapters housed in two parts, "Classical Greek Literacy and the Spoken Word" and "Logos Perform­ ers, Screen Sophism, and the Rhetorical Turn", followed by an "Appendix: Excerpt from the Origin Myth ofAcoma and Other Records". In Chapter 1, "Introduction: Screen Literacy in Rhetoric and Composi­ tion Studies", she opens with the captivating image of the television screen which, for better or for worse, is ubiquitous in "locations of power as well as of powerlessness". In addition to contrasting it effectively with the com­ puter screen which "mostly appears in locations of power" (p. 4), Professor Welch vows to rouse humanities scholars from what she condemns through­ out as their utter refusal to acknowledge and rethink the massive cultural changes which attend the universal sign system of video. Of no surprise to those familiar with her prior excellent contributions to the history and theory of rhetoric and composition, she believes that that mission can best be accomplished by returning to (and revamping considerably) Isocratic rhetoric. Simply put, Electric Rhetoric proposes a holistic approach to three fundamental principles: (1) that literacy conditions "how people articulate Reviews 131 within and around their ideas, their cultures, and themselves, including their subject positions"; (2) that "any current definition of literacy must account for changes in consciousness or mentalité"; and (3) that literacy "depends on social constructions (including [sic] gender and racial constructions) that give value to some writing and speaking activities and that devalue others" (pp. 7-8). Chapter 2, "An Isocratic Literacy Theory: An Alternative Rhetoric of Oral/Aural Articulation", provides the forum for Welch's endeavor to re­ cover Isocrates. Praising his recognition of the dependence between articu­ lation and thought and his emphasis on aptitude vs. native ability (p. 51), she simultaneously vilifies his rhetoric, which "reveals for us strikingly one of the hideous aspects of classical rhetoric: it appears to erase women or to victimize us. This erasure works hand in hand with Isocrates's agenda of imperialism, an intolerance, a dehumanizing of Others, for which he must be held accountable" (p. 49). Our job, then, as readers of Electric Rhetoric, is to hold the past accountable. The main thrust of Chapter 3, "Disciplining Isocrates", is to dismantle "the Great Man theory of history writing, with some token women thrown in the same underlying theoretical structure" (pp. 82-83). It contains some fascinating readings of the Antidosis, notably the dancing bear episode and its link to learning ability. What is not clear, however, is why "Isocrates's biggest problem lies in his and...

Research Article| January 01 2001 Cutting Class in the Multicultural Literature Classroom Vivyan C. Adair; Vivyan C. Adair Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Sandra L. Dahlberg Sandra L. Dahlberg Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2001) 1 (1): 173–175. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-1-173 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Vivyan C. Adair, Sandra L. Dahlberg; Cutting Class in the Multicultural Literature Classroom. Pedagogy 1 January 2001; 1 (1): 173–175. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-1-173 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2001 Duke University Press2001 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Margaret A. Syverson discusses the ways in which a theory of composing situations as ecological systems might productively be applied in composition studies. She demonstrates not only how new research in cognitive science and complex systems can inform composition studies but also how composing situations can provide fruitful ground for research in cognitive science.Syverson first introduces theories of complex systems currently studied in diverse disciplines. She describes complex systems as adaptive, self-organizing, and dynamic; neither utterly chaotic nor entirely ordered, these systems exist on the boundary between order and chaos. Ecological systems are metasystems composed of interrelated complex systems. Writers, readers, and texts, together with their environments, constitute one kind of ecological system.Four attributes of complex systems provide a theoretical framework for this study: distribution, embodiment, emergence, and enaction. Three case studies provide evidence for the application of these concepts: an analysis of a passage from an autobiographical poem by Charles Reznikoff, a study of first-year college students writing collaboratively, and a conflict in a computer forum of social scientists during the Gulf War. The diversity of these cases tests the robustness of theories of distributed cognition and complex systems and suggests possibilities for wider application.

The authors attempt to confront the construction of “whiteness” as a silent but potent epistemology that pervades writing instruction and contributes to racism within academic institutions. Pedagogical practices as well as university policies are discussed, focusing particularly on the subject positions of “black” and “white” for both students and instructors.

Critical Pedagogy; Identity (Psychological) Explores the potential of hybridity for supporting critical pedagogies that seek to transform the knowledge, texts, and identities of the school curriculum. Draws on microanalyses of oral and written texts constructed by a Latina student perceived to be struggling academically. Shows the student interweaving home, school, and peer language practices to serve a variety of social and personal agendas.

Arguing that the immediate historical context of desegregation is vital to an understanding of Shirley Brice Heath's Ways with Words, this article reports on materials from the archives of Heath's research housed at the Dacus Library of Winthrop University. What emerges from reading Heath's letters and other materials at the time she was researching Ways with Words is a portrait of an ethnographer trying to negotiate existing stereotypes and raw tensions in the scholarly and public discourse on race while attempting to adhere to the tenets of the ethnographic approach of the 1970s. Taking a critical race theory approach, the article suggests that these materials indicate that Ways with Words could most fruitfully be read at this point as a story of the persistence of prejudice—a story that suggests the failure of the arguments in favor of desegregation to broker lasting reforms toward equity, and one that reveals the different and racialized meanings literacy acquires in response to historical shifts.

Ethnic and gender differences in classroom conversational styles are explored by comparing student involvement in face-to-face and computer-mediated discussions. The quantity of participation in these two environments is triangulated with student perceptions of the conversations in three undergraduate composition classrooms. White males participated more frequently than other groups in the face-to-face setting, and White women appeared to benefit more than other groups from conversations held in the computer-mediated setting. However, these gender-differentiated participation patterns did not apply to the discourse patterns of Hispanic males and females. Unlike their White female peers, the Hispanic women in this study participated frequently in the face-to-face conversations, spoke more than Hispanic males, and generally disliked the computer-mediated conversations.

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Many authorities have come to recognize the critical importance of the Greek notion of kairos (right timing and due measure) in contemporary rhetoric. But Aristotelian scholars have generally ignored or demeaned Aristotle's use of kairos in his rhetoric, often contrasting it especially to Plato's full treatment in the Phaedrus. This lack of attention has been partially due to faulty indexes or concordances, which have recently been corrected by Wartelle and programs like PERSEUS and IBICUS. Secondly, no one has hitherto attempted to go beyond the root kair- and examine the concept as expressed in other terms. This article will attempt to meet both of these concerns. It will first examine care-fully the 16 references to kairos in the Rhetoric and show that the term is an integral element in Aristotle's own act of writing, in his concept of the pathetic argument, and in his handling of maxims and integration. There are also important passages using kairos in his treatment of style, often in conjunction with his use of the notion of propriety or fitness (to prepon). Possibly the two most important indirect uses of the concept of kairos can be seen in Aristotle's definition of rhetoric and in his treatment of equity in both the Rhetoric and the Nichomachean Ethics, probably the two most important treatments of the concept in antiquity.

More than 1,600 serials from across the disciplines were identified as sources for technical communication scholars. The 99 most frequently cited serials are described. This citation analysis is distinguished from others by the size of the database (25,000+ citations), the 10-year review of articles published in five technical communication journals between 1988 and 1997, the number of serials cited and reviewed, and the focus on technical communication as a discipline. The analysis yielded two observations. First, five technical communication journals have grown in strength as forums for discussions of technical communication. Second, the serials cited illustrate the diversity of resources referred to from business, education, psychology, science, and technology-related sources. As a discipline, technical communication has developed depth and rigor through building the base of its research and theory while integrating the research and theory gathered from a number of disciplines.

Studies how experienced teachers of literature created a sense of continuity and coherence in a curriculum over relatively long periods of time. Finds that although the classrooms created a stable set of domain conventions, similarity in broad topics and goals within the curriculum masked great diversity at the level of classroom practice.

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Reviews 111 Shirley Wilson Logan, "We Are Coming": The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 255 pp. Shirley Wilson Logan introduces "We Are Coming": The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women by stating, "This book examines the public persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century black women intellectuals" (p. xi). She continues in the Preface to talk more specifically about the nature of the historical era of the analysis, constraints on the availability of texts, the nature of both public discourse and persuasive discourse, and the rhetorical theories and strategies that shape her analysis. Near the end of the Preface she says, "My hope is that these discussions might also add to a clearer understanding of nineteenth-century culture and of the ways in which the persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century black women adapted itself to its multiple audiences and multilayered exigences" (p. xvi). By this process, Logan makes the reader immediately aware of the extent to which the participation of African American women in public discourse during the nineteenth century signals complexity, rather than simplicity, and a need for contemporary researchers to account for patterns in rhetorical practices at the same time that we resist reducing those patterns to simplistic and monolithic notions of a "Black women's rhetoric". First of all, in focusing attention on specific rhetors, Logan re­ inscribes the historical record with the names of women who actively charted new pathways for rhetorical engagement during an era of remarkable social, political, and economic change. She brings texture to what we have come to know about the rhetorical performances of Maria Miller Stewart, Frances Watkins Harper, Ida Wells Barnett, Fannie Barrier Williams, Anna Julia Cooper, Victoria Earle Matthews, Mary Shadd Cary, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and others who in recent years have been brought to the attention particularly of teachers and scholars in women's studies, ethnic studies, and literary studies. To this list, however, she adds the names of women whose accomplishments are much less familiar: Rosetta Douglass-Sprague, Alice Woodby McKane, Lucy 112 RHETORICA Wilmot Smith, Mary Cook, Edmonia Highgate, Georgia Swift King and others. She reminds us that to date we have only scratched the surface of the history of African American women's intellectual work as she places the subjects of her study more visibly onto the rhetorical landscape. Using five themes that are symbolized by quotations from the texts of die rhetors, Logan explains in systematic ways how the rhetorical actions of this group were shaped and performed amid various systems and forces of the social environment. She raises for critical viewing points of inquiry that help us to envision these women both individually and collectively, interrogating, for example: the importance of allusions to an African past in the gamering of rhetorical power; their commitment to forging alliances across various communities of interest; the directing of their energies toward critical issues within the African American community; the use of specific strategies in the art of persuasion; their creation of their own arenas for rhetorical engagement; and the ways and means of rhetorical action in the particular arena of the Black Clubwomen's Movement, that is, their shaping of the discourse of racial uplift. Logan suggests that individually these women illustrate a breadth of rhetorical responses to a continuity of exigencies and that collectively they were quite astute at finding ways to invoke lively connections between themselves and their audiences; to invent themselves anew within their performative arenas; and to respond provocatively to the exigencies of multiply constrained rhetorical situations. The effect of Logan's approach is to underscore a critical point that she makes in her statement of purpose, that is, her assertion that these women are intellectuals. In attending to individual practices, common exigencies, and thematic points of inquiry, Logan makes visible that the case to be made ultimately with this analysis is not simply that African American women engaged persuasively in rhetorical practices in public arenas during this era, but that their doing so demonstrates the liveliness of their intellectual engagement and their ethical commitments. Logan's choice in making this case is to lead us analytically through a textual display, making conditions...

Reviews 113 are able to do so with a useful vocabulary, specific examples, and an assessment of the landscape of rhetorical practice that sets a new pace. Her title, then, "We Are Coming", gains increasing significance. Indeed, African American women are coming onto the rhetorical scene, and this analysis contributes greatly to our ability to take into account in interesting ways what their presence means. JACQUELINE JONES ROYSTER The Ohio State University Lynette Hunter, Critiques of Knowing: Situated Textualities in Science, Computing, and the Arts (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), vi + 239 pp. Critiques of Knowing is a disarmingly accurate title for Lynette Hunter's most recent book, a study of the relevance of rhetoric to critical theories of language in several fields. Standpoint theory, Hunter proposes, integrated with rhetorical understandings of ethos, topos, and audience, can both illuminate, and exemplify the need for a rhetorical critique of "critical and aesthetic discourses for talking about communication, textuality, and the arts" (p. 7). The discussion moves patiently and informatively through discourses about ideology and the nation state, agency, the subject, recent studies of artificial intelligence and computing, hypertext models of literary texts, "scientific" discourse studies and linguistic poetics, feminist critiques of science, and feminist aesthetics. Hunter weaves rhetoric into the methods and languages of these disciplines with subtlety and common sense; readers will find in each chapter an up to date review of current critical theory in the fields reviewed. Another major accomplishment of the study as a whole is a collateral appraisal of the languages and epistemologies, stated and unstated, that each field employs. The comparison is no easy task, particularly since the fields under scrutiny have been prominent advocates of critiquing knowledge, understood as comprehension of the "real" 114 RHETORICA by subjects capable of knowing, and of representing their knowledge in representational, informative texts. This relentless critique of knowledge and language in recent theory, Hunter asserts, has resulted in a barrage of pluralisms and relativisms, each with its own canonical ideology. Hunter teases out different versions of an "essentialist-relativist" standoff that has emerged again and again among recent ideological constructions of plurality (pp. 6-7). In characterizing many of these problems Hunter is not alone; she will find readers welcoming her positions. What makes her discussion original and especially valuable is the way in which she brings to this impasse several richly drawn definitions of rhetoric. Because of its historical and conceptual self awareness as "inexorably different to the real world" in any literal or scientific sense, rhetoric can help construct an analysis of stance which will position the discourses of the disciplines historically, politically, and socially (p. 6). The prospect that rhetoric may be able to integrate and amplify a number of critical discourses about language that are currently bogged down in confessing their own impossibility and meaninglessness is a welcome vision. Hunter's exposition of the ethical and epistemological adjustments rhetoric could provide to contemporary critical discourses is also an anatomy of the past and present wealth that resides in rhetorical studies that continue to be marginalized by so many fields. The chapters are arranged by discipline: contemporary studies of the ideologies of nation-states, studies of artificial intelligence and computing applications within the humanities, hypertext methodologies, feminist critiques of science, and feminist critiques of aesthetics. Hunter's analysis establishes an important parallelism: a lack of rhetorical self awareness has hampered the discussion of the subject and of agency, of intelligence and knowledge, of the ethics of critical discourses visa -vis their contexts and audiences. Hunter defines her overall goal as "a critique of critical and aesthetic discourses for talking about communication, textuality, and the arts" (p. 7). The essentialistrelativist standoff that Hunter seeks to redress has locked many branches of discourse studies, including linguistics, artificial intelligence, computing, rhetoric and poetics, into methodologies that, somewhat oddly, base social and political tolerance for all Reviews 115 discursive practices upon scientific models of neutral description and quantitative analysis. Somehow, according to many of these models, discourses are produced by "the culture" or by "language". Alternatively, we find accusations of "essentialism" or "enlightenment humanism" hurled at any and all references to the subject, to agency, to an ethnic...

Describes a study unit for ESL (English Second Language) students on language and identity. Explores the dichotomy of attitudes and behavior occurring when a nonnative speaker tries to embrace a new language and culture. Concludes that reading and writing about multicultural literature in the ESL classroom helps students gain language skills and better perspectives on the diversity of American culture.

Most traditional works of rhetorical history have excluded the activities of women, but Listening to Their Voices retrieves the voices of women who contributed to the rhetorical realm. The nineteen essays in the collection extend existing definitions of rhetoric and enrich conventional knowledge of rhetorical history. In her introduction Molly Meijer Wertheimer traces the patriarchal nature of traditional rhetorical histories as well as the continuing debate about how best to write women into rhetoric's historical record. The volume's essays advance rhetorical theory by examining exceptional women rhetoricians and their unusual rhetorical practices and strategies. Covering a diverse range of rhetorical pursuits and historical eras, the selections look closely at such fascinating topics as the bold speech of ancient Egyptian women, the rhetorical genres of mother's manuals and women's commercial writings in the Middle Ages, the sexual stereotyping of prose style in rhetorical theory of the Enlightenment, and exhortations for racial uplift by nineteenth-century African American women.

To bridge the gap between composition and professional communication studies, we should add multiculturalism to the widely accepted international perspective in professional communication instruction, thus transforming the classroom into a contact zone (Pratt). The practical necessity of intercultural communication in a global marketplace necessitates internationalization. The international perspective, accounting for the heterogeneity of the technical communication audience, focuses on audience analysis and leads us to encourage students to learn about the multiple, cultural layers of audience. A multicultural perspective, however, can teach students of professional communication about the complex relationship between language and ideology and the underlying forces that shape and reflect the ways we use language. Multiculturalism's critical component provides insights into the structures and ideologies of domination/subordination and provides students with the linguistic, intellectual, and moral tools for resisting fear and prejudices. Likewise, the international perspective in professional communication can inform issues of audience analysis in composition.

Offers future researchers many opportunities for research in two-year college English. Considers input about issues, problems, and questions which the research community still needs to engage. Assumes that research clusters around several “fault lines” shared by other groups and institutions not directly tied to education; the fault lines selected are identity, technology, diversity, pedagogy, literacy, and methodology.

I participate in a teaching and learning collaborative called Intercollegiate Electronic Democracy Project (IEDP). The project's goal is to enable students' participation in democratic culture through rhetoric and public writing. Using Internet and Web technology, we inhabit an electronic public sphere where both teaching and learning are collaborative, connecting teachers and students from many institutions across country, and where pedagogy, public issues, and politics intersect. From perspective of rhetoric and composition, IEDP embraces three topics important to our field: computers and writing; public discourse, especially deliberative rhetoric; and multiculturalism, specifically contact-zone theory and pedagogy. This essay elaborates some implications of this nexus. While much of pedagogy I discuss reflects strategies successfully used in IEDP, its implications extend to similar projects that engage students in electronic public sphere. Ever since Mary Louise Pratt challenged teachers to develop pedagogical arts of contact zone (40), many teachers have become more sensitive to multicultural dynamics of their classrooms, and they have begun to chart what Richard E. Miller calls the uncharted realms of teaching and studying in contact zone (407). There have been theoretical projects such as using contact zones as a basis for rethinking and reorganizing English studies (Bizzell); efforts such as those that address challenges posed by asymmetrical power relations in classroom (Miller) and differences in cultural perspectives and values (van Slyck); and investigations of specific contact-zone phenomena such as students' strategies for coping with dominant discourses (Canagarajah) and the politics of style (Lu). These developments signify our ability to respond to multicultural classroom conditions by accommodating educational needs and desires of all students. Nowadays, however, classroom per se is no longer sole site for teaching, learning, writing, and speaking. With growing interest in public discourse and civic participation among students-and with rapidly increasing

Discusses how “I Have a Dream” is the product of African-American rhetorical traditions of ceremonial protest and jeremiad speech-making, rituals that had crystallized long before King was born. Describes the peaceful essences of the March on Washington and how it was a “Ceremonial Protest.” Considers the historical use of “I Have a Dream” over the previous 130 years.

Introduction Multicultural Education: Definitions, Development, Variants, and Controversies Multiculturalism: Egalitarian Social Reconstruction through Educational Reform Multiculturalism: An Assessment of Variations, Basic Arguments, and Concepts The Multicultural Agenda and Critical Thinking Compared Bibliography Index

Composition (at its best) and feminism work against the grain of conventional institutional practices. Both challenge assumptions and seek to transform ways of thinking, teaching, and learning. Both are complex, containing different agendas and different voices. Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words is a feminist project that boldly places at its center differences among women. Topics discussed include American history, politics, language, racism, pedagogy, contingent labor in the teaching of writing, e-mail behavior, and the need for educational and institutional reform. Teachers, graduate students, program administrators, and feminists will find valuable the critiques, theoretical as well as personal, contained in this unusually honest and thought-provoking volume.

A s a field of professional inquiry intertwined with the practice and teaching of its own subject, composition studies has enjoyed the steady pace of its own recent evolution.Few composition scholars twenty years ago would have imagined the rate at which the field is now developing, exploding beyond its boundaries, creating new alliances, and locating new sites for inquiry and knowledge production.These current transformations owe in part to the inevitable burgeoning of a theoretically interdisciplinary field with a strong orientation toward self-reflection.They also owe to unprecedented changes underway in higher education, changes pressured by shifts in the politics and economics of university administration, the advent of new technologies, population changes that affect student demographics, and the creation of alternative structures and contexts for teaching and learning.Composition, in seeking a disciplinary identity, is questioning the ways it creates and mediates knowledge and the ways in which that knowledge informs and is informed by various contexts for research and practice.This collection focuses on the ways in which composition reconsiders established dichotomies, examines new connections among areas of inquiry, and suggests avenues for inquiry that have transformative consequences for the sites of theory, research, and teaching.When we first proposed this volume of essays, we sought submissions that reconsidered the relationship among theory, research and practice, expecting that our focus would primarily be on the changing face of composition research.Our open call and invitation to individual scholars, however, resulted in very few reports of research studies, but rather in contributions that reflect the extent to which the theory/research/practice relationship now occupies our disciplinary thinking.Since the publication of Stephen North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (1987), the past decade has seen attention to research methodology largely displaced by conflict between theory and practice.This conflict, still rooted, one might argue, in the desire for a unified theory, often centers on the extent to which any theory employed by compositionists must grow, if not from research, then from practice, or at least edgment of "what is contradictory, and perhaps unknowable" (9).Many of the authors in this volume (Rose and Lauer; Chiang; Grimm, et al.; Okawa) build into their essays acknowledgement of their positions as scholars and researchers and examine their "findings" as cultural and ideological products.At that same time, some of them are quick to point out the limits and consequences of new theories and methodologies for composition as a disciplinary community (Seitz; MacDonald; Neff; Ray and Barton).Increasingly, compositionists have more confidence in the recognition that teaching makes knowledge, and that practice, overdetermined as it is, continually calls into question the traditional purpose of theory-to explain unaccounted-for phenomena and solve new problems.Lore, as North distinguishes it from traditional disciplinary knowledge production, can, Harkin argues, be thought of as postdisciplinary theory, because it allows for practitioners' often contradictory attempts to solve writing problems with more than one cause, rather than using theory in the traditional way to contain situations (134).Beth Daniell has argued that while composition theories may lack the authority to dictate pedagogy, as rhetoric, they are what persuade us to teach writing in the ways that we do (130).At the same time that theories may contain the discipline by "serving the interests of . . .groups within that discipline" (131), they are what enable us, she says, to "create a community in which we can figure out what we, individually and collectively, believe about our work" (135).In that rhetorical and political sense, theory is practice.But, as several of the authors in this volume (Ferry; Vandenberg; Howard) ask, whose "work" and whose interests define us and remain at the center of composition as a discipline?Can theory, research, and practice in ever new relationships intersect and hold an expanding community together or drive it apart into separate communities whose power and authority may be in jeopardy?Composition's calling into question its knowledge comes at a time when the authority of that expert knowledge may be at risk.In the wake of shrinking graduate programs and the responsibility-centered-management of academic departments in the new corporate universities, the literature components of some English departments are beginning to reclaim an expertise in the teaching of writing or, in some instances, to efface that expertise, deeming it no longer necessary, politically appropriate, or cost-effective.Much composition scholarship in fact contributes to this withering away of the more public conception of composition.Our growing understanding of complex context-specific literacy practices runs counter to institutional conditions that assume composition is an essential set of transparent skills to be conveyed one-time-only to first year students by exploited instructors.If retooled writing courses do result from the disciplinary boundary crossing of compositionists into deconstruction, feminist, multicultural, and cultural studies, what in the experiences of teachers and students justifies or interrogates these theories in practice?How does interdisciplinary inquiry expand avenues and change how and what we research and teach?What locates theorists, courses, teachers, and programs that might grow from this research within "composition"?Several of the authors in this volume locate their concerns about composition's "identity crisis" in a disjuncture between theory and pedagogy, whether questioning composition's attempts to achieve more disciplinary status (Ferry; Vandenberg; Howard) or its failure to focus more attention on knowledgebuilding inside the field (MacDonald; Neff).

Questions whether authors can authentically represent a culture of which they are not a part. Considers what kind of shifts will occur in preservice teachers’ understandings of the “right to write.” Finds that as preservice teachers learn more about the current debate through class readings and discussions, they move from straightforward statements to hesitations over the hard issues raised.

Discusses how education is still a profession held hostage by images. Presents concerns dealing with racial expectations in the field of English education. Focuses and concentrates on the contents of the English language and literature professions that, although acknowledging its many diversities, avoids the distraction of “finding someone to look the part.”

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.

Reed Way Dasenbrock

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Describes a writing assignment in which students study and imitate the language of a minority author. Discusses how the assignment helps negotiate conflicts when students resist multicultural literature, as their creative responses mediate between themselves and works they might otherwise find foreign and antagonistic.

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

Reviews 91 from the margins—Margaret More, Anne Askew, and Queen Elizabeth I. In Chapter Five Glenn stresses the performative value of her project: the "promise that rhetorical histories and theories will eventually (and naturally) include women" (p. 174). She presents "four ways...[to] work together to realize...[these] performative...goals": we must recognize our common ground, "explore various means of collaboration", reevaluate the notion of "silence", and recognize the unlimited opportunities for research in this area (p. 174-78). This was a difficult book to write. Feminist rhetorical scholars have already identified at least three limits such revisions must observe: any feminist account of the history of rhetoric cannot stand alone, but must be continuous somehow with mainstream rhetorical histories; simply inserting "exceptional women" into an otherwise unrevised traditional account is insufficient; and only by exposing the cultural oppressions that silenced women can we hope to break their hold. Glenn succeeds brilliantly in balancing these demands as she makes the best connections she can among new kinds of (feminist) interdisciplinary research, while observing a time limit necessary for publication. Her accomplishment is significant, even though there are probably readers who will want to set the record straight about this historical person or that fact, or to join the pieces of the story more amply. Nonetheless, the space her work creates teems with opportunities for research and for insights about possible rhetorical selves for us all. MOLLY MEIJER WERTHEIMER Pennsylvania State University Molly Meijer Wertheimer, ed., Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997) 408 pp. Studies of women's contributions and challenges to the rhetorical tradition are still sparse but, thankfully, growing. Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities ofHistorical Women constitutes a welcome addition to this blossoming field. Edited by Molly Meijer Wertheimer, Listening to Their Voices comprises an RHETORICA 92 impressive array of eighteen articles on women's rhetorical activities in contexts ranging from Ancient Egypt to twentiethcentury Europe and America. Authored by American scholars (with the exception of one Canadian), these articles greatly increase the available research on women in the history of rhetoric. The range of historical periods and cultural contexts that the articles address underscores the neglected richness and diversity of women's contributions to rhetoric, as well as the extent of all that remains to be recovered and reinterpreted. Notably, the collection stretches the realm of rhetorical activity beyond its traditional focus on public, argumentative speech or writing to include, in particular, the non-traditional genres of private letter­ writing and conversation. The inclusionary diversity of Listening to Their Voices reveals, as Wertheimer notes in her introduction, a feminist appreciation of difference and multiplicity (p. 4). At the same time, this collection is well-unified. Its unity stems, most fundamentally, from the authors' joint assumption that the study of women's rhetorical activities is worthwhile and important to the history of rhetoric. As well, the articles demonstrate a consistently fine historical contextualization of the women rhetors and rhetoricians they discuss, uniformly avoiding the imposition of contemporary social categories on these women of the past, highlighting instead the cultural and political realities which motivated and shaped their rhetorical activities. In some cases, these activities are presented as those of an "exceptional" woman who was "able to be heard in the male public sphere" (p. ix). More intriguingly, in my view, several of the studies foreground the practices of communities of women as well as rhetorical activities addressed to contexts beyond the "male public sphere". The volume is divided thematically into four main sections, an organization that allows us to perceive non-chronological links between the articles' differing historical points of focus. I will review each section in turn, commenting only—in the interests of brevity, not of ranking—on several but not all of the articles. The first section, entitled "Making Delicate Images", includes three articles that highlight the difficulties of recovering the rhetorical roles and contributions of women within a patriarchal tradition. Cheryl Glenn, for example, relocates Aspasia "on the rhetorical Reviews 93 map" by sifting through and reading against the "powerful gendered lens" of references to her in male-authored texts (p. 24...

Writing in Multicultural Settings. Ed. Carol Severino, Juan C. Guerra, and Johnnella E. Butler. New York: MLA, 1997. 370 pages.

Investigates problems faced by minority students. Examines case studies of African-American men who had finished bachelor’s degrees in education or English at a predominantly White university. Reports case study participants’ responses to their school experiences.

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

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Reviews 433 the starting points for quite some time for those interested in other rhetorical traditions. Although Kennedy validates these traditions by placing them under the aegis of Greco-Roman rhetoric, this still constitutes a step forward in our study of world rhetorics, and we can be grateful to him for taking this first, hardest step. Mary Garrett Ohio State University Andrea A. Lunsford ed., Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995). Inscribing women into canons of writing from which they had long been excluded by a male-dominated canon-forging orthodoxy, telling (as a consequence of these inscriptions) new stories, "her" stories as distinct from his-stories, about past traditions of writing and speaking, pointing out what Carol Gilligan (1982) calls the "different voice" of women, those distinctive formal characteristics that distinguish "feminine" from "masculine" uses of language, all those have been standard goals of feminist criticism of the past two decades. In pursuing those goals, Reclaiming Rhetorica positions itself in relation to significant feminist critical projects such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's path-breaking The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) or Elaine Showalter's The New Feminist Criticism (1985) Most of the essays in the volume do, indeed, engage in reclamations of female voices and in the inscriptions of those voices in canons of writing and speech. Susan Jarratt and Rory Ong reconstruct the figure of Aspasia, who had been a teacher of rhetoric in classical Greece, from the fragmentary references to her in male-authored texts, and in the course of doing so, offer a compelling reading of the way in which Aspasia, as represented in Plato's Menexenus, both "exceeds the gender boundaries of Greek citizenship" that excluded women from oratory and is used to 434 RHETORICA "ventriloquize the very principles of exclusion that she challenges" by insisting on the myth of autochtonous birth of the Athenian citizen, which divests women of their reproductive role in the polis (pp. 19-20). Cheryl Glenn argues for redefining the English canon to include The Book of Margery Kempe on the basis not of the gender of its author but of her innovative contribution to narrative technique: the invention of a form in which "female spirituality, selfhood and authorship" converge (p. 59). Some of the essays in the volume underscore the formal and political contributions made by women whose place in the canon has already been recognized such as Marie de France, the author of a manual of ethical instruction for medieval women, Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller, pioneers of women's rights, and twentieth-century intellectuals such as Suzanne Langer and Julia Kristeva. Others carve out a space for the discursive and social achievements of African American public women whose voices had largely been silenced, such as Ida B. Wells, a liberated slave who became a journalist and mounted a verbal anti-lynching campaign (p. 177) and Soujoumer Truth, who "commanded large crowds in an effort to arouse public action on the two most crucial political and social issues of her day -slavery and suffrage" (p. 227). Other essays in the volume address another common concern of feminist criticism: the existence of a distinctive feminine or female mode of language or vision of language. Thus C. Jan Swearingen rereads Plato's Symposium to reconstruct and reclaim Diotima's view of language as animated by "feeling, desire, love, and pity", a view that she identifies with recent insights into "women's ways of knowing" that stand in stark contrast to univocal, masculinist visions of language that have dominated Western thought since Plato (pp. 48-49). Christine Mason Sutherland shows how the rhetorical theory of the seventeenthcentury rhetorician Mary Astell diverges from that of her sources (Lamy and Descartes) in its emphasis on "caring", which is said to be "typical to women's approach to ethics", and its insistence on conversation rather than agonistic confrontation which recent research has associated with a "masculine epistemology" (pp. 113-15). In a similar vein, in her discussion of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jamie Barlowe underscores the latter's belief in Reviews 435 "dialogue" as a discursive form that is appropriate for achieving "feminist aims of effecting changes...