Edward Schiappa. The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1999. x + 230 pages. Maureen Daly Goggin. Authoring A Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the Post‐World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition. Manwan, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000. vii‐xxviii + 262 pages. $59.95 cloth. Ann E. Berthoff. The Mysterious Barricades, Language and Its Limits. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. 191 pages. Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter. The Cultivation of Body and Mind in Nineteenth‐Century American Delsartism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. 152 pages + 17 photographs and illustrations. $55.00 hardcover. Brenda Jo Brueggemann. Lend Me Your Ear: Rhetorical Constructions of Deafness. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1999. 336 pages. $49.95 cloth. Laura Gray‐Rosendale. Rethinking Basic Writing: Exploring Identity, Politics, and Community in Interaction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000. vii‐xiv + 191 pages. $39.95 cloth. $19.95 paper.

M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer. Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992. xi + 312 pages. John Frederick Reynolds, David C. Mair, Pamela C. Fischer. Writing and Reading Mental Health Records: Issues and Analysis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992. 109 pages. Nathaniel Teich, ed. Rogerian Perspectives: Collaborative Rhetoric for Oral and Written Communication. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1992. 303 pages. $24.50. Gerald McNiece. The Knowledge That Endures: Coleridge, German Philosophy and the Logic of Romantic Thought. London: Macmillan, 1992. 226 pages.

Coleridge criticism has a stormy quality about it, as if what we know about Coleridge is something we see only by flashes of lightning over some dark landscape. In Experience Into Thought, Kathleen Coburn says that Coleridge is irritating to certain tempers, perhaps especially to the curriculum-making academic mind(67). Her statement is ironic. Coleridge was always working on curriculum. His rage for a system that included the irrational and lucky graces forced him into whole courses about thinking and language, whole encyclopedias of knowledge. Still, the plan in most academic circles seems to have been to place Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the canon as a fragment of history and forget him. After long years of reading criticism about Samuel Taylor Coleridge rather than reading his works, it is time to see if there is a Coleridge worth claiming for rhetoric and composition. One problem in validating a Coleridge for our time is reading him. It seems that we have lost the habit of reading his kind of discourse. Perhaps because of his translations and readings of the German Transcendentalists, Coleridge's prose wanders and speculates, opposes its central premises, comments on itself incessantly. Composition scholars see him as an antithesis of the kind of style recommended in our classrooms and in our journals. Also, as composition studies attempt to establish territory in departmental turf wars, Coleridge becomes an easy target for those who would use him to demonstrate how literary concerns should not be included in composition pedagogy. As much as some might want Coleridge to go away, he will not. Linda Flower argues that Coleridge's inspirational model for composition is a threat to the teaching of composition (Problem-Solving). Ross Winterowd asserts that Coleridge is a primary reason for the devaluation of the literature of fact because his theory of composition or rhetoric lacks purpose (64). In both cases, eminent scholars and researchers in the field of composition are reacting to a stereotypical view of Coleridge and his works, as if the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan represent Coleridge's philosophy and theory of composition. But there is more to Coleridge's philosophy of composition than his poems, his theory of imagination in Biographia Literaria, or his criticism suggest. Kenneth