The phenomenon of the Octalog came into being at the 1988 CCCC when James J. Murphy, with support from Theresa Enos and Stuart Brown, proposed and chaired a roundtable composed of eight distinguish...

Traditional priorities of English as a discipline are now significantly at odds with the material circumstances of college English departments. To address these realities, college English needs to become literacy studies rather than literary studies.

Abstract Balancing the critiques of scientism in communications, this response notes how belletrism has marginalized rhetorical studies on the other side of the modern opposition of the arts and sciences. Such institutional divisions need to be assessed against broader changes in literacy if our disciplinary histories are to be a resource for assessing how rhetoricians in composition and communications can work together. The marginal positions of composition and speech courses may undermine the prestige of rhetoric as an academic discipline, but the margins can be a place of power if approached pragmatically. Looking beyond the pragmatic professionalism of disciplinary insiders such as Stanley Fish, we need to develop alliances with practitioners of the arts of rhetoric outside as well as within the academy if pragmatism is to contribute to the institutional work of making universities into institutions of public learning.

The Establishment of Modern English Prose in the Reformation and the Enlightenment by Ian Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 218 + xv pp. Voices in the Wilderness: Public Discourse and the Paradox of Puritan Rhetoric by Patricia Roberts‐Miller. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. 209 + xiii. The View from On the Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac by Omar Swartz. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. 130 pp. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy by Kathleen E. Welch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 256 pages. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres by Gerard A. Hausen Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 335p. A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family by Peter Dimock. Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press (Illinois State University), 1998. 118 pp.

(1990). The formation of college English: A survey of the archives of eighteenth‐century rhetorical theory and practice. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 261-286.

Conley, Thomas M., Rhetoric in the European Tradition, New York: Longman, 1990. 325 pp. Sonja K. Foss, Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration & Practice. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1989. Pp. v + 420.