The course treated film, fiction, and all matter of non-fiction as textual representations equally worthy of critical analysis. Distinctions between signifiers from domains traditionally labeled "rhetoric" and those from domains labeled "poetics" held no water. Like Linkon's syllabus from two decades ago, The Half Life of Deindustrialization assumes that all texts have the potential to reveal important insights about cultural myths and values. Her engaging study looks at texts from a wide range of genres that offer representations of deindustrialization in the United States. Linkon sees memory, nostalgia, socio-economic insecurity, community, pride, and politics through a critical lens, offering a nuanced and compelling portrait of how deindustrialization still reverberates, even decades after initial waves of plant and factory closings.

I sit down to write this review at a fraught moment for talking about class, and especially the working class. On Facebook, many friends are discussing a recent Equality of Opportunity Project repo...

Working-class people perform class identities. These performances are marked with ironies in which working class symbolizes power and powerlessness. Such performances elide linear meaning-making in favor of poetic paradox and help us understand the contradictions of working-class life. The New Deal, a chapbook by my great-grandfather, represents an occasion for understanding how one working-class person used language to consider his life's contradictions. The chapbook articulates a unique “working-class poetics” and suggests why rhetoricians ought to locate representations of the paradoxes of working-class life.

The preceding two essays focused on the challenges presented by students’ selfdisclosures in their writing. The authors, Janet Lucas and William DeGenaro, have read each other’s essays and provided the following brief responses. This cross talk between the writers continues, in a more deliberate way, the cross talk generated by their essays.

Responding with strategic empathy to the traumatic stories students share with us provides an opportunity to break down an elitist binary between teacher and student. Joyce Carol Oates’s novel them can serve as a cautionary tale for understanding the dangers of disregarding student trauma.

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Notes how early junior college compositionists sought to socialize a largely working-class student body into a middle-class sensibility. Argues that educators must make time to create historical narratives of two-year colleges as a valuable precursor to fighting for institutional reforms within institutions. Analyzes the manner that curriculum builders in the 1920s and 1930s constructed first-year writing courses at junior colleges.