In this article, the authors analyze the history of 12th- century Byzantine intellectual Anna Comnena with attention to the use of rhetoric in her life and work. By analyzing the fragmentary historical record about Anna, they revise earlier readings of her relation to power, shifting critical scrutiny from a psychological perspective on Anna as an emotional and disappointed woman to her rhetorical performance and choices as a historiographer. By studying her strategies of self-presentation and use of figured discourse, they locate Anna as a participant in world-changing events: a writer who communicates the losses and pain experienced by those living in violent and politically volatile times.

Argues that Kenneth Burke used “The Interpretation of Dreams,” as well as other works by Sigmund Freud, as a lesson on reading, taking over the central tropes of dreamwork and making them broadly dialectical rather than strictly psychoanalytic terms. Suggests that Freud’s “tropology” of dreaming is crucial for reading Burke.

[A]ll. . . transcending of the thing by its name is toward death. And in this sense, even the most vital of language is intrinsically deathy. It is a realm of essence such that, without the warm blood of live bodies to feed it, it cannot truly exist. The spirit of all symbol systems could be said to transcend the body in this sense, taking on a dimension that can also be named by our good word for death: immortality. (Language as Symbolic Action 342)

Besides the editors, the essayists are Lori Chamberlain, Michael Clark, Dennis A. Foster, Jon Klancher, Randall Knoper, Elaine O. Lees, Mariolina Salvatori, and Nina Schwartz. Donahue and Quandahl present accessible and exciting efforts to explore composition teaching in a new mode perhaps, a pristine paradigm of cultural criticism. Approximately half of the essays investigate the pedagogical agenda implied in the theories of a particular writer Barthes, Lacan, or Burke, for exampleand place such theories in the The remaining essays examine pedagogy as a critical practice. The book does not advocate a single method of instruction but instead reminds us that theory is itself continually modified by the classroom.

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The theory that reading is composing-an open-ended, investigative, and active process-is hardly new. Over the past few years, writing teachers have turned their attention to reading and extended the useful term to describe not only the recursive movement among the pre-writing, drafting, and revising stages of writing, but also the construction of meaning through reading. The theories they have drawn on range from the work of reading researchers like Harry Singer, Frank Smith, and Charles Cooper and Anthony Petrosky to critical theorists like Wolfgang Iser, Louise Rosenblatt and Roland Barthes.' While it is difficult to generalize about such wide-ranging work, a quick review of the literature of constructive reading shows agreement on one point: the power of conventions, or schemata, to shape our understanding of a text. But the language for naming this phenomenon is divergent. Reading researchers describe the process of composing meaning in apparently neutral terms-comprehending, reading for meaning, learning from text-and some separate a literal from an interpretive level of reading,2 using Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy (89-90), influential since the 1950s. Critical theorists, on the other hand, show that all composed meanings are interpretations; this is the view we want to illustrate as we describe, theoretically and practically, a sequence of writing assignments used to encourage interpretation in our introductory composition classes. In our view, the same questions asked by critical theory-what is reading, what is the status of a text, how do we clarify approaches to interpretation-are questions to be asked by composition teachers, whose job is to teach students how to compose readings of texts, literary and non-literary, written and nonwritten. With this aim in mind, we agreed to define interpretation as a process of both reading and writing. We discarded conventional injunctions to look at the words, as if simply gazing at words on the page would force them into meaning. We insisted instead that good readers must understand the assumptions that determine what they see, that good writers do not wait for meaning to take

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