Kirsch

42 articles
University of California, San Diego
  1. Deep Rhetoricity as Methodological Grounds for Unsettling the Settled
    Abstract

    So often left unquestioned is the very place in and from which scholarly ethos and praxis are being proposed. The goal of this essay is to call for and work towards establishing a foundation to explore such questions vis-à-visdeep rhetoricity.Deep rhetoricityinvites and demands of us all returns, careful reckonings, and enduring tasks. We illustrate possibilities ofdeep rhetoricityacross these three epistemic principles. Ultimately, we argue fordeep rhetoricityboth as an intervention into rhetorical practices and as a praxis of invention.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202232274
  2. Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory
    doi:10.1080/02773945.2021.2006051
  3. Review
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Review, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/73/1/collegecompositionandcommunication31593-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ccc202131593
  4. Sex, Labor, and Bodies: The Regulatory Power of Rhetoric
    Abstract

    This issue of RSQ offers an intriguing showcase of the wide range of topics, places, and subjects that rhetoricians now study on a regular basis. We encounter a finely detailed portrait of the hist...

    doi:10.1080/02773945.2016.1229462
  5. Gertrude Stein Delivers
    Abstract

    In 1934 Gertrude Stein returned to the United States, for the first time in thirty years, to give her Lectures in America. Approaching the delivery of her lectures within their historical context, mediating communicative shifts from the nineteenth-century novel to twentieth-century publicity, and accounting for distinctions between speaking and writing, Stein used public relations strategies to capitalize on her celebrity and to introduce audiences to her modernist compositional processes. The lecture tour became an occasion for engaging the public relations culture that dictated the terms of her image's circulation and for retheorizing delivery in an age of publicity.

    doi:10.1080/07350198.2012.683998
  6. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: In Search of Excellence
    Abstract

    In this article, we undertake three critical tasks: First, we delineate major shifts in feminist rhetorical inquiry, thus describing a new and changed landscape of the field. Second, we argue that as feminist rhetorical practices have shifted, so have standards of excellence. To articulate excellence in feminist rhetorical studies, we draw attention to interconnections among three critical terms of engagement: critical imagination, strategic contemplation, and social circulation. Third, we propose an enhanced inquiry model for understanding, interpreting, and evaluating feminist rhetorical work in rhetoric and writing studies.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201011333
  7. Perspectives: From Introspection to Action: Connecting Spirituality and Civic Engagement
    Abstract

    Kirsch explores “the connection between spirituality and civic engagement,” suggesting that “spirituality—broadly defined to include mindfulness, introspection, and reflection—can play an important role in enabling rhetorical agency.”

    doi:10.58680/ccc20097199
  8. “Suppose a grammar uses invention”: Gertrude Stein's Theory of Rhetorical Grammar
    Abstract

    This article elucidates Gertrude Stein's theory of rhetorical grammar by locating it in her studies at Harvard University/Radcliffe College in the mid-1890s and by demonstrating how for Stein the study of grammar correlates with rhetoric's first canon, invention. In her experimental primer, How to Write (1931), a book about the craft of composition, Stein devotes chapters to vocabulary, sentences, paragraphs, grammar, and forensics, but refuses to reduce writing to mechanical correctness. For Stein, a grammar that supposes invention as both discovering and creating does something much more than offer pre-existing rules for writers to follow. Placing Gertrude Stein's writing practices in the rhetorical traditions of the nineteenth century reveals a Gertrude Stein who is not necessarily or not only a literary figure, but rather a twentieth-century rhetorician who refigures past traditions to teach a new century how to write.

    doi:10.1080/02773940802167567
  9. Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook
    doi:10.2307/4140686
  10. I Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person Writing, by Karen Surman Paley
    Abstract

    Preview this article: I Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person Writing, by Karen Surman Paley, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/55/2/collegecompositionandcommunication2751-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ccc20032751
  11. I Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person Writing
    Abstract

    In this ethnographic study of the teaching of writing, Karen Surman Paley reveals the social significance of first-person writing and the limitations of a popular taxonomy of composition studies. Paley looks critically at the way social constructionists have created an Other in the field of composition studies and named it expressivist. Paley demonstrates the complexity of approaches to teaching writing through an ethnographic study of two composition faculty at Boston College, a program that some would say is expressivist. She prompts her colleagues to consider how family experiences shape the way students feel about and treat people of races, religions, genders, and sexual preferences other than their own. Finally, she suggests to the field of composition that practitioners spend less time shoring up taxonomies of the field and more time sharing pedagogies.

    doi:10.2307/3594224
  12. The Politics of the Personal: Storying Our Lives against the Grain. Symposium Collective
    Abstract

    Deborah Brandt, Ellen Cushman, Anne Ruggles Gere, Anne Herrington, Richard E. Miller, Victor Villanueva, Min-Zhan Lu, Gesa Kirsch, The Politics of the Personal: Storying Our Lives against the Grain. Symposium Collective, College English, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Sep., 2001), pp. 41-62

    doi:10.2307/1350109
  13. The Politics of the Personal: Storying Our Lives against the Grain
    Abstract

    This symposium presents a written dialogue of scholars expressing not only excitement but also frustration over the ways in which current work in composition and literacy studies has explored the politics of the personal.

    doi:10.58680/ce20011239
  14. Ethics as Barometer: The Impact of Postmodernism and Critical Theory on Composition
    doi:10.2307/358967
  15. Gesa E. Kirsch Responds
    doi:10.2307/378567
  16. Comments and Response: A Comment On “Multi-Vocal Texts and Interpretive Responsibility”
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Comments and Response: A Comment On "Multi-Vocal Texts and Interpretive Responsibility", Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/60/3/collegeenglish3689-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce19983689
  17. Carl Sagan
    doi:10.2307/378300
  18. Poems
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Poems, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/59/8/collegeenglish3662-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce19973662
  19. Multi-Vocal Texts and Interpretive Responsibility
    doi:10.2307/378548
  20. Opinion: Multi-Vocal Texts and Interpretive Responsibility
    Abstract

    Examines the effects of reading and writing multivocal texts and argues that writers need to assume interpretive responsibility for creating new forms of discourse.

    doi:10.58680/ce19973618
  21. Comment &amp; Response
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Comment & Response, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/58/8/collegeenglish9014-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce19969014
  22. Two Comments on "Teaching and Learning as a Man"
    doi:10.2307/378234
  23. Voices from the Ark
    doi:10.2307/378409
  24. Feminist Critical Pedagogy and Composition
    doi:10.2307/378579
  25. Review: Feminist Critical Pedagogy and Composition
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Review: Feminist Critical Pedagogy and Composition, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/57/6/collegeenglish9107-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce19959107
  26. Shadows of Doubt: Writing Research and the New Epistemologies
    doi:10.2307/378251
  27. Women, Rhetoric, Teaching
    doi:10.2307/358876
  28. Beyond the Personal: Theorizing a Politics of Location in Composition Research
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Beyond the Personal: Theorizing a Politics of Location in Composition Research, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/46/1/collegecompositioncommunication8751-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ccc19958751
  29. Revising for publication: Advice to graduate students and other junior scholars
    Abstract

    (1995). Revising for publication: Advice to graduate students and other junior scholars. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 25, No. 1-4, pp. 237-246.

    doi:10.1080/02773949509391047
  30. Evolving Paradigms: WAC and the Rhetoric of Inquiry
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Evolving Paradigms: WAC and the Rhetoric of Inquiry, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/45/3/collegecompositionandcommunication8778-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ccc19948778
  31. The Politics of I-Dropping
    Abstract

    I write in response to James Raymond's I-Dropping and Androgyny: The Authorial I in Scholarly Writing (CCC 44.4, December 1993, 478-83). I appreciate Raymond's reflections on the increased uses of the authorial I in scholarly writing; his observations are particularly noteworthy because, serving as former editor of College English, he not only observed trends in the field but actively shaped them. What interests me here is how Raymond poses the question about the authorial I in terms of appropriateness and then identifies three qualities as typical of its successful use: topical relevance, authoritative voice, and energy of novelty and dissent (479). As Raymond puts it:

    doi:10.2307/358817
  32. Evolving Paradigms: WAC and the Rhetoric of Inquiry
    Abstract

    university campuses gathered at the University of California, Santa Barbara, at a conference we organized to discuss the pedagogy and politics of in the disciplines. Some teams were comprised of writing program lecturers at University of California campuses; teams from other universities consisted of tenure-track faculty in composition and other fields who were developing and teaching in WAC programs at their campuses. Discussion centered around the politics of WAC, institutional constraints, collegial networking, faculty development, and teaching models and objectives. Though participants welcomed such discussion, when group members began to name what they did and to define their goals, a level of conflict emerged that surprised us. Some participants spoke long and heatedly about the primacy of writing to learn, while others argued with equal heat for the power of discourse conventions in specific fields. A gap soon opened between the two groups that seemed almost unbridgeable. Upon reflection, we realized that the conference was playing out in microcosm one of the major conflicts in our field-a conflict variously expressed as voice versus discourse, learning versus performance, process versus form. In this article we explore the theoretical and pedagogical implications of this conflict for writing across the curriculum. We argue that the conflict itself is based on a false dichotomy and that work in the social construction of knowledge-particularly the concept of rhetoric of

    doi:10.2307/358816
  33. On Authority in the Study of Writing
    Abstract

    Preview this article: On Authority in the Study of Writing, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/44/4/collegecompositioncommunication8816-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ccc19938816
  34. Methods and Methodology in Composition Research
    Abstract

    In original essays, fourteen nationally known scholars examine the practical, philosophical, and epistemological implications of a variety of research traditions. Included are discussions of historical, theoretical, and feminist scholarship; case-study and ethnographic research; text and conversation analysis; and cognitive, experimental, and descriptive research. Issues that cross methodological boundaries, such as the nature of collaborative research and writing, methodological pluralism, the classification and coding of research data, and the politics of composition research, are also examined. Contributors reflect on their own research practices, and so reflect the current state of composition research itself.

    doi:10.2307/358846
  35. A Sense of Audience in Written Communication
    Abstract

    This book brings together the best current original work on the concept of audience in written communication. Firstly examining historical and theoretical perspectives on audience, the contributors explore and synthesize current theories on its shifting and intangible nature as well as the broader context of post-structuralist concepts of reader, writer and text. The second part of the book embraces a wide variety of research on audience and serves to illuminate contested theoretical points of earlier chapters. Authors of chapters report on case studies, textual analyses, comparative experimental research and protocol analysis.

    doi:10.2307/357370
  36. Writing Up and Down the Social Ladder: A Study of Experienced Writers Composing for Contrasting Audiences
    Abstract

    This study explores audience awareness of writers as they compose for contrasting audiences. Experienced writers—all of them writing instructors at large public universities―composed aloud for two audiences which differed along the dimension of authority: incoming freshmen and a faculty committee. Protocols were analyzed for patterns of writing activities among all writers and for individual writers. Among all writers, two clear patterns emerged. Writers analyzed the faculty audience less frequently than the freshman audience, but they evaluated their text and writing goals more frequently when addressing the faculty. For individual writers, strong “interpretive frameworks” emerged, unique ways in which writersi nterpreted audiences and writing tasks, foregrounding quite different elements of the rhetorical situation. At times, interpretive frameworks overrode differences between the two audiences presented in the writing tasks; that is, writers attributed the same characteristics to both audiences despite the difference in these audiences’ social status within the university structure.

    doi:10.58680/rte199115474
  37. Students’ Metacognitive Knowledge about Writing
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Students' Metacognitive Knowledge about Writing, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/23/4/researchintheteachingofenglish15507-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/rte198915507
  38. Comment and Response
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Comment and Response, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/51/1/collegeenglish11330-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce198911330
  39. Three Comments on "Only One of the Voices: Dialogic Writing across the Curriculum"
    doi:10.2307/378189
  40. Non Standard English Usage in the Writing of Black, White, and Hispanic Remedial English Students in an Urban Community College
    doi:10.58680/rte197320131
  41. Film and Literature: Contrasts in Media
    doi:10.2307/357156
  42. Book Reviews
    doi:10.2307/374712