bonnie lenore kyburz' reflective and deeply felt sense of (her) place in Composition creates room to consider some of the rhetorical dimensions and pedagogical implications of film work in writing classrooms and as digital scholarship. Invoking affect theorist Lauren Berlant's concept of "cruel optimism" to articulate the findings of her archival, analytical, and experiential methods, Cruel Auteurism describes a cultural shift within the discipline, from the primacy of print-based arguments, through an evolving desire to generate cinematic rhetorics, toward increasingly visible forms of textual practice currently shaping composition classrooms and digital scholarship.

bonnie lenore kyburz teaches writing and rhetoric at Northern Illinois University. She works to support creative vision and attempts to compose reflective, rhetorically timely texts via digital filmmaking, installations, multimodal composing, and print. She makes short digital films, documentaries and experimental pieces that hope to resonate as entertaining, provocative arguments for evolving scholarly scenes. kyburz values metacognitive work that announces its emergence from an artist's immersive process. Her work appears in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, Enculturation: A Journal of Writing, Rhetoric, and Culture, Composition Studies, College English, and other NCTE publications.