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Literary theories put forward by Stanley Fish, David Bleich, Walter Michaels, and Jonathan Culler all insist, to varying degrees, that any individual critic's view of a particular literary text is likely to be affected by certain assumptions (schemata) shared by the community of scholars to which the critic belongs. Literary interpretation, so the argument goes, is not a matter of individual perception alone; every interpretation is both a process of individual discovery and a product of shared interpretive strategies. From this reader-response perspective, then, the prior assumptions held by the interpretive community are crucial constituents of the discourse, and often, as in the case of the Canadian interpretive response, such shared assumptions form the paradigm that in time becomes the locus of critical authority. Canadian criticism, in particular that branch which focuses on prairie fiction, offers an intriguing case study of just such an interpretive community at work. Canadian literary criticism has long spoken if not with one voice then at least with a widely-shared critical intent: to further the aims of cultural nationalism by establishing a critical narrative that privileges those aspects of Canadian literature-the lonely prairie landscape, the implacable brooding force of Nature, the sense of human isolation-that are historically associated with the early Canadian pioneer experience and the process of nation-building. Once accepted, the narrative assumes paradigmatic status: it establishes a closed frame of reference marked by remarkable critical consensus. Such a state of critical concord has not gone unnoticed. In his retrospective look at the teaching of Canadian literature, John Harker explains that

Although Canadian literature is part of a complex known as New World literatures, it differs from other American literatures in its historic recognition of both French and English as official languages. Finally-and this fact is often overlooked, even in Canada-the federal government's multicultural policy provides a climate in which other literatures are permitted to flourish in a variety of ways. Taken together, these facts have certain implications that merit exploration.

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

R.W.B. Lewis' biography of Edith Wharton mentions with her other late works the 1934 short story Fever as a masterpiece of rhetorical coherence, but insists that in writing the piece Wharton was unperturbed by news from Europe of a terrible ... at hand (Biography 527). He suggests that the pervading tone of calm and repose in the story underscores her virtual mastery of history, of the past-both Wharton's own past and, in particular, the question of her paternity-as as the past of the species represented by the Roman ruins. Yet her Fever questions origins, persecution, and sexual violence-Rome itself a powerful site of primal violence. Her story interrogates society's periodic demand for an ultimate return to origins: whether it be racial purification or sexual housekeeping. Lewis writes that the possibility of Wharton's illegitimacy must have edged its way into Mrs. Wharton's mind over the years that followed [1908-09: the years in which the rumor began]. . . . situation of Grace Ansley's whole lifetime is revealed in a single phrase, and just possibly, with all obliqueness, one phase of Edith Wharton's situation as well (Collected Stories xxv). question of race and origin, which is central to Fever, also centers the moment of history-the terrible revolution brewing in Europe. Many critics would agree with Lewis about Wharton's apolitical, serene, and new state of being in the thirties (Biography 524). Cynthia Griffin Wolff does not deal with Wharton's politics at all, while, at worst, other critics label Wharton an anti-Semite. Cynthia Ozick writes that Edith Wharton was compliant in the face of her friend Paul Bourget's openly-declared anti-Semitism (293). Sol Liptzin's in American Literature cites Wharton's caricature of the bounder Jew as an example of her anti-Semitism (154); Wharton's name also appears as evidence of a general cultural anti-Semitism in Florence Kiper Frank's 1930 Bookman essay, The Presentment of the in American Fiction (274; see Dobkowski 177-80). At best, Wharton is considered a social critic with her own ideological blindspots, racism and anti-Semitism among them. (She condemns Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven, along with all nigger society in Harlem, in an April 1, 1927 letter to Gaillard Lapsley.)

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

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

Blending a complete writing-about-literature text, a literature anthology, and a handbook into one, this distinctive book guides students through the allied processes of critical reading and writing -- illustrating the use of writing as a way of studying literature, and providing students with all of the tools necessary to analyze literature on their own. The text promotes interactive learning by integrating writing instruction with the study of literature. NEW to this edition: *Arguing and interpretation guidelines *Additional casebooks *Updated and expanded Companion Website -- the addition of a Writing About Literature section, interactive timeline, author photos, easy navigational bar, information on literary theory We are delighted to offer select Penguin Putnam titles at a substantial discount to your students when you request a special package of one or more Penguin titles with any Prentice Hall text. Contact your Prentice Hall sales representative for special ordering instructions. www.turnitin.com -- This new online resource is now available free to professors using Literature and the Writing Process, Sixth Edition. Turnitin.com, formerly Plagiarism.org, is a powerful tool to help instructors identify and prevent student plagiarism on the Web.

If is one thing contemporary observers of American literary studies agree upon, it is New must finally be transcended. William Cain, for example, protests New Critics' identification of with close reading of classic literary texts. It is not 'close reading' is itself misconceived, he argues, rather case for it has always been made at expense of other important things. Because New Critics won their case so convincingly, these other things have long been excluded from literary establishment. A list of costs resulting from institutionalization of New in 1950s, according to Cain, would include the rejection of other methods and other kinds of texts; misguided attempt to define (and thus defend) teaching of literature as, above all, 'close reading'; skepticism shown towards literary theory; and refusal to see other disciplines as having relevance for 'literary' criticism (New Criticism 1111-12). Criticism, in short, has become formalistic, to use an old critical buzz-word. Even deconstruction, as Cain correctly observes, is more an intensified continuation of tradition of formalistic close reading than a new, expansive kind of Fortunately, says Cain, there have been signs in recent years New Critical reign is at last coming to an end. The most important of these signs is the revival of 'history' as an instrument for criticism. This revival is result of work of certain critics and theorists-Cain mentions Foucault, Said, and Jameson-who have shown that 'history' does not have to imply-as it did for scholars New Critics attacked in 1930s-a narrow and naive review of sources, backgrounds, and influences. Rather, history now means the formation of an archive, building up of a rich, detailed, and complex discursive field. The ground for criticism, from this point of view, is not classic literary text, but inter-textual configurations and arrangements; 'criticism' thus entails study of power, political uses of language, and orders of discourse (New Criticism 1116-17). This reconstitution of ground for will produce, presumably, an analogous transformation of practice of close reading and expand domain of to include methods, texts, and disciplines suppressed by New Criticism. These developments, needless to say, win Cain's seal of approval.

Most Freshman English programs conceive of themselves as providing some form of introduction to university level discourse. The expectation is that students will leave English I (or whatever its designation) with the requisite reading and writing skills to enter a new discourse community, the world of the academy. Just what that means, however, is invariably in contention. Even within our own discipline, the acts of reading and writing have become the subject of much controversy. A recent review in College English gives some indication of one of the current divisions within the profession about exactly what we teach people when we teach them to read: Despite the recent wrangle and heated debates among the various camps of literary criticism, there are quite a few of us-most,

In his essay The Function of Rhetorical Study at the Present Time, J. Hillis Miller remarks: the recognition that all language, even language that seems purely referential or conceptual, is figurative language and an exploration of the consequences of that view for the interpretation of literature represent, it seems to me, one of the major frontiers of literary study today (13). This view of language also represents one of the major frontiers of composition study. To connect this view of language to the study of composition, I propose that a theory of can be a means of relating composition theory to literary theory. More specifically, I would like to suggest that the four metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony - can provide a conceptual framework for the composing process and a guide to critical reading. Tropes have developed into an explanatory power in a great many disciplines, including rhetoric, linguistics, philosophy, history, and literary theory. Rhetoricians have catalogued and defined a large number of these tropes, four of which - metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony - have been considered the most important. Kenneth Burke labeled these the master tropes

I think that, as rhetoricians and writing teachers, we will come of age and become autonomous professionals with a discipline of our own only if we can make a psychological break with the literary critics who today dominate the profession of English studies... [Already] we've left home in many ways, but we haven't cut the cord.... For example: We keep trying to find ways to join contemporary literary theory with composition theory. -Maxine Hairston, Breaking Bonds and Reaffirming Our Connections, CCC 36 (1985): 273-74.

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

The role of the reader in how the meaning of a text is formed has been a nearly obsessive concern of recent critical thought. Books and articles abound taking one stand or the other on the question of where meaning lies: in the text, in the reader, in the intentions of the author, in the intertext, in the practices of interpretive communities, and so on. For the most part, such talk tends to be seen as a kind of elegant diversion-the stuff of graduate seminars and doctoral thesessomewhat removed from the more practical tasks of teaching our students to read intelligently and to write with conviction. And certainly things seem to go on pretty much as they always have in most classes on literature-that is, texts get assigned to be read and papers to be written, students plow more or less dutifully through both, some haggling over meanings and grades takes place, and students and teachers alike go home at the end of the term, having done Shakespeare, or the Seventeenth Century, or the Modern Novel, or even Literary Theory. The writings of Jacques Derrida and Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish haven't changed that, and I doubt that any theory of reading ever will. But while theories of reader-response or deconstruction may seem to have had little effect on the practice of teaching literature, they do hold much in common with how many of us try to teach writing. The reasons for this are fairly plain. The meanings of most texts read in literature classes really are pretty stable-not because they hold some sort of intrinsic fixed messages, but simply because they are familiar texts that we, as a community of readers at the university, have long agreed on how to go about interpreting. This isn't the case, though, when we read student writing. Then we are faced with texts that are both new to us and whose meanings have often not yet been fixed even in the minds of their authors. In a freshman writing class the instability of meaning is a fact of life, not a point of critical debate. Nowhere else is the importance of a reader's expectations, of interpretive codes, shown more clearly. Where we look for analysis, our students often appeal to emotion; where we expect example, they call on popular sentiment, what everybody knows. The problem is not that our students are dumb, but that they're not yet members of the club-they don't know the sorts of things we as academics look for when we read. And so one way of looking at our task as teachers of writing is to see it as helping our students to confront the kinds of talk that go on at the university, to think about the values and assumptions that underlie such discourse. Joseph Harris teaches writing at Temple University.

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Composition studies began to take its contemporary form only in the early 1960s. There is no unbroken theoretical tradition from classical rhetoric to the present, although scholars in composition studies have attempted to reinvent the work of earlier theorists as foundations for their own work.' Perhaps because of this discontinuity in the tradition and because composition studies has been constituted as a field so recently, there is also no dominant theory governing composition studies today. Some theorists seek the universal laws of composition, or at least a universally applicable method for investigating such laws, while others seek to understand discourse in its historical context. Not coincidentally, the period in which composition studies has developed has also been a period of theoretical upheaval in English studies, the parent discipline. Composition theorists have drawn on the contending literary theories of this period as much as on the rhetorical tradition in shaping their own debates. One reason for this influence of literary theory on composition theory is that almost every active scholar in composition studies today holds a degree in English literature, not in composition and rhetoric. This situation is changing as degree programs in composition proliferate, but the majority of faculty who design and teach in these degree programs were themselves trained as literary critics. Much important work in composition studies shows the influence of the scholars' literary training. For example, Mina Shaughnessy has subjected the essays of unsuccessful student writers to a sort of new-critical close-reading. She is thus able to show that the students' tortured sentence structures are actually attempts to make meaning, albeit meaning in an unfamiliar world, the academic. Elaine Maimon has analyzed as literary genres the various kinds of academic discourse, thus uncovering their knowledge-generating conventions. Ann Berthoff has generalized a theory of the poetic imagination, derived primarily from the work of I. A. Richards, to explain all attempts at making meaning in language. Composition specialists have not only used literary training in their own work but also urged on their students a kind of literary close-reading ability as a means to develop the students' own writing. Pedagogy such as that of Peter Elbow and Ken Macrorie assumes that the same critical eye that allows the

Responses to one poem, Coleridge's Frost at Midnight, were studied using repertory grid technique. Twenty-one undergraduate stu- dents of English literature participated. A significant commonality in response was found within the grids, suggesting that for this group of readers a number of invariant features in the poem were determining response. The grids also brought to light individual differences in approach to the poem, which were explored during interviews with each student. Grid technique thus offers a method for mapping the boundary between individual and common features in literary response. A major tradition in literary studies has argued that a literary text offers one correct reading which all well-informed and sufficiently sensitive read- ers can be expected to discover. Recent arguments have undermined the authority of this approach: Fish (1980, p. 13), for instance, finds the author- ity of the text secondary to that of the interpretive community in determin- ing a given reader's response. One recent reader of Fish has taken him to imply that any reading of a literary work is acceptable (Eagleton, 1983, p. 85). Behind this debate lies an obvious but important theoretical point. To what extent does a given literary work constrain individual readings? Does a work's structure as a whole, for example, tend to determine the way in which its parts will be understood? Or is the work open at any point to influences originating outside the boundary of the text? Clearly, texts cannot be divorced from the language and culture in which they are written and read; but it might be postulated that a work of literature is distinguishable from other types of discourse by its possession of a structure of meaning internal to the text, and that this tends to direct the responses of all com- petent readers. To be specific: two or more elements within a text may be amenable to a variety of interpretations, according to the disposition or experience of indi- vidual readers; for example, I may enjoy Donne's attitude toward women, my neighbor may detest it. But if, despite such response differences, inter- pretations of particular elements in the poem show systematic relationships to each other across all readings, it may be argued that the text exhibits an internal structure that is determining response. In studying this question Groeben's (1980) distinction between text mean- ing and text sense is helpful. We may postulate that a given work has a

This essay explores parallels between new paradigms in the sciences, particularly quantum physics, chemistry, and biology, and new paradigms in reading and literary theory, particularly a socio-psycholinguistic, semiotic, transactional view of reading and a transactional view of the literary experience. Among the major parallels emphasized are the following concepts: reality is fundamentally an organic process; there is no sharp separation between observer and observed, reader and text, reader/text and context; the whole (universe, sentence, text) is not merely the sum of parts which can be separately identified; meaning is determined through transactions between observer and observed, reader and text, reader/text and context, and among textual elements on and across various levels. When a friend first introduced me to Fritjov Capra's The Turning Point (1982), I was intrigued by what Capra describes as the paradigm emerging in fields as diverse as physics and economics, psychology and medicine. Clearly, I thought, there are direct parallels between the paradigm Capra describes and that emerging in my own field, reading theory. Seeking to better understand such parallels, I delved into other recent books that describe for the non-scientist the paradigm emerging in the sciences. First among these was Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979), a fascinating introduction to quantum physics. More recent books include Wolfs Taking the Quantum Leap (1981), Jones's Physics as Metaphor (1982), Campbell's Grammatical Man (1982), Prigogine and Stengers' Order Out of Chaos (1984), Comfort's Reality and Empathy (1984), and Briggs and Peat's Looking Glass Universe (1984). Each of these in some way contributes to an understanding of the paradigm emerging in the sciences. In the following essay, I draw from books such as these some key concepts that seem to be emerging, or rather re-emerging, from various scientific disciplines, and trace parallels between these and similar concepts that have been re-emerging in reading theory and in literary theory. This work was supported by a Fellowship from the Faculty Research and Creative Activities Fund, Western Michigan University. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 19, No. 3, October 1985

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

Books on literary theory and criticism by Cain, Â Eagleton, and Lentricchia Kenneth Johnston The Other Tongue, ed. Braj B. Kachru Alan C. Purves The Leaning Tower of Babel, by Richard Mitchell Richard F. Gregory

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The principal purpose of this study was to determine the low inference constituents of literary response. Data were obtained from 166 college undergraduates enrolled in nine introductory literature courses. A stimulus condition consisting of six dissimilar short stories and poems was devised. After reading each literary work, subjects were asked to complete a modified version of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement's Response Preference Measure. To determine empirically the constituents of literary response, subjects' ratings for each item for all six forms of the Response Preference Measure were jointly subjected to the principal axis method of common factor analysis. Subsequent to varimax rotation, the following four factors were interpreted and labeled: personal statement, descriptive response, interpretive response, and evaluative response.

Articles by Richard Fulkerson, Karen Pelz, and Michael Hogan in the first issue of the Journal of Advanced Composition (Spring 1980) all pointed to a serious lack of consistency in the profession's conception of what should be covered in advanced composition courses in college. Professor Pelz, while arguing against what she perceives as another teacher's advocacy of media-centered rather than writing-centered advanced composition courses, advocates the development of a personal style in advanced writing courses, seemingly calling for an emphasis on expressive discourse and self-discovery (A Reply to Medicott: Evaluating Writing, 7-9). Professor Fulkerson (Some Theoretical Speculations on the Advanced Composition Curriculum, 9-12) uses Abrams' and Kinneavy's theories of literary criticism and the aims of discourse to construct two different curricular models for advanced composition programs--one suggesting courses based on the skills required of students as they produce discourse with different aims, the other suggesting synthesizing all four discourse aims in a single advanced composition course. Finally, Professor Hogan (Advanced Composition: A Survey, 21-29) sent questionnaires to 374 advanced composition teachers at 311 schools and found an enormously diverse range of course objectives and plans among the responses that he received. Hogan also found that many advanced composition courses used the same books as freshman writing courses in the same schools. Although rhetoric, Hogan found, dominated the courses of instruction, there did not seem to be any clear or consistent pattern of rhetorical approach in the schools or teachers who reported. Very few respondents, in fact, reflected much attention to types or aims of discourse, as Fulkerson had suggested, in their assignments or plans. Articles such as these reflect the composition profession's general lack

Language study and literary criticism have for many years been separated. Modern developments in critical theory have stressed the study of texts. Structuralism developed a semiotic approach to texts using psychological and linguistic theory to support objective analysis. Poststructuralist theory has further developed these approaches investigating deep and surface significance in textual interpretation urging a deconstruction of texts to yield a full contemporary understanding. The relationship between writer, reader, text, and context is seen anew within the whole communication complex in an approach which regards texts as discourse. Advanced foreign language teaching unites literature and language in a new synthesis stressing communication and conceptualization through language. Technical communication should be aware of new interdisciplinary trends since it is itself at the center of the dominant theme of communication.

James L. Kinneavy's A Theory of Discourse: The Aims of Discourse (PrenticeHall, 1971) has contributed much to field of English. Evidence of its impact that it required reading for two NEH seminars-Edward P. J. Corbett's summer seminar at Ohio State and Dudley Bailey's year-long seminar at University of Nebraska. This evident concern and book's recent appearance in paperback (Norton, 1980) prompt a review of its strengths and limitations. Kinneavy clarifies need for order in English studies, but-to use his own term for characterizing field-his work preparadigmatic in that his categories are static and his approach too closely tied to literary criticism to be helpful in Though he intends to rescue from the present anarchy of discipline,' his theory unsatisfactory for many teach composition, largely because he fails to account adequately for rhetorical choices and composing processes. This review will focus on some of underlying reasons for limited success of Kinneavy's theory. Kinneavy seems aware of many of his presuppositions, including his assumption that he can side-step considering rhetorical processes. However, he does not always seem to be aware of implications of his methodological decisions. His decision to analyze the aim which embodied in text itself (49) based on a desire to concentrate on rather than composition. A theory of composition, he argues, would require attention to process of composing, a concern he concludes is not desirable for an analysis of aims (4). He prefers to deal with with the characteristics of text, with decoder, who primary element in any communication situation (49-50). Ironically, though he recognizes rhetorical significance of writer's audience, he fails to perceive that rhetoric, unlike discourse analysis, must deal with process by which texts come into existence. He thus sets out to establish the basic foundations of composition and to provide a framework of research for all areas of dis-

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For many twentieth-century teachers of English, John Locke (1632-1704) is a peripheral, rather than a mainstream, figure in the literary history of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. With some of those teachers, he merits mention only as the friend and the physician of the first Earl of Shaftesbury, who served as the model for Achitophel in John Dryden's famous satire, and as the tutor for the third Earl of Shaftesbury, the author of the pre-Romantic manifesto Characteristics. Maybe in connection with an undergraduate course in political science or in a Great Books course in the Humanities division or in a course in Colonial American literature, some of them read Locke's Second Treatise on Civil Government and learned that this document not only attempted to justify the Whig revolution of 1688 in England but also served our Founding Fathers as the rationale for our own Revolution and our own democratic form of government. Even if they had not read snippets from Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) in anthologies of eighteenth-century literature, they could not escape the many references to that work in the literary works of the period and in the literary histories of the period. If they were aware that the Essay was a philosophical work, they were not quite sure whether it could be classified primarily as a contribution to psychology or logic or metaphysics or epistemology. Virtually none of those twentieth-century teachers-including myself, until recently-were aware that Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding made a contribution to the development of rhetoric in the eighteenth century. For those of us who regarded John Locke as only a subsidiary figure in the literary life of the eighteenth century, the following statement by Kenneth MacLean in his bookJohn Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1936) is an eye-opener: The book that had most influence in the Eighteenth Century, the Bible excepted, was

Moby-Dick is a classic of technical literature as well as a classic of American literature. But for the technical writing teacher, its relevance goes beyond this: Moby-Dick can also be a valuable teaching resource. It provides pertinent examples for teaching students the concepts of audience, purpose, research and sources, use of background experience, and thoroughness in compiling data. It also supplies ample models of technical definitions, descriptions, processes, and theories. Finally, Moby-Dick demonstrates the kind of energetic technical writing that is so needed today.

The essays in Gender Studies explore relationships between gender and creativity, identity, and genre within the context of literary analysis. Some of the essays are psychoanalytic in approach in that they seek to discover the sexual dynamic/s involved in the creation of literature as an art form. Still others attempt to isolate and examine the sexual attitudes inherent in the works of particular authors or genres, or to determine how writers explore the sensibilities of each gender.

Several months ago, a colleague and I presented a proposal to the Ph.D. graduate committee at Arizona State University for a new concentration on the Ph.D. level in rhetoric, composition, and linguistics. Our proposal seemed reasonable enough. What we were proposing was that graduate students be given a series of options on the Ph.D. level, so that those whose primary interest was belles lettres could choose from among the traditional areas of English and American literature. However, those whose primary interest was language, or a broader conception of letters as exemplified by the bonae litterae of the Renaissance, could do half of their work in the traditional areas of literature and half of their work in rhetoric, composition, and linguistics. We argued that students seeking degrees in order to teach and to do research face a job market very different from the one that students encountered as recently as eight or nine years ago, and drastically different from what most teachers encountered when they began. We reminded the committee of the results of the MLA Job Information List, published in the February 1978 ADE Bulletin, which showed a preponderance of job opportunities for people in the areas of rhetoric, composition, and linguistics. For example, of the 405 jobs advertised in '76-'77 for people with Ph.D.'s in English, 56 of those jobs were in rhetoric and composition, 53 in linguistics, and 29 in creative writing. Then in descending order, there were 18 openings in American Literature, 18 in Black Studies, 17 for generalists, 15 each in Old and Middle English Literature, 19th Century British Literature, and American Studies, 13 in Renaissance Studies, 8 in 19th Century American Literature, 7 in Colonial Literature, and so forth. We emphasized that the opportunity for serious research and scholarship in rhetoric and composition has never been better. The professional membership in the Conference on College Composition and Communication has increased dramatically over the past few years. The MLA has recognized the

WHERE DO ENGLISH TEACHERS GET THE AUTHORITY to teach writing to students from other departments? We know-and our non-English colleagues know-that the English major is basically an English and American literature major and that graduate programs in English are more of the same, only intensified. How then are we equipped to teach students whose present and future writing tasks are very far from the literature we study? At times in my career as an English teacher I've felt myself beset by people from other departments who understandably want an answer to that question. Now that I teach technical writing rather than Freshman English in my department's composition program, I feel myself more frequently under siege. Maybe Freshman English, the question goes, but technical writing? How dare I presume to teach chemical engineers, or astrophysicists, or biochemists how to write? Technical writing taught by English teachers is the acid test of our authority; in spirit as well as subject it seems to be at the farthest remove from nearly everyone's idea of literature. Three members of the Department of Humanities, College of Engineering, at the University of Michigan have launched an especially pointed attack on English departments' teaching technical writing. J. C. Mathes, Dwight W. Stevenson, and Peter Klaver list three reasons for their doubts about letting someone from the English department teach technical writing. The first and second reasons appear to me indistinguishable, but come down to these two passages:

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