First published in 1938, this lively collection of over 150 tales and songs runs the gamut from joy to woe, from horror to humor. In forming the collection, Charles Neely required only that the tales and songs—whether home grown or transplanted from the great body of world lore— had taken root somehow in the area of southern Illinois known as Egypt.

Notable tales include "Bones in the Well," "A Visit from Jesse James," "The Flight of the Naked Teamsters," "The Dug Hill Boger," and "How Death Came to Ireland"; among the songs and ballads are "Barbara Allen," "Hog and Hominy," "The Drunkard’s Lone Child," "The Belleville Convent Fire," "Shawneetown Flood," and "The Death of Charlie Burger."

Jo Keroes's scope is wide: she examines the teacher as represented in fiction and film in works ranging from the twelfth-century letters of Abelard and Heloise to contemporary films such as Dangerous Minds and Educating Rita. And from the twelfth through the twentieth century, Keroes shows, the teaching encounter is essentially erotic.

Tracing the roots of eros from cultural as well as psychological perspectives, Keroes defines erotic in terms broader than the merely sexual. She analyzes ways in which teachers serve as convenient figures on whom to map conflicts about gender, power, and desire. To show how portrayals of men and women differ, she examines pairs of texts, using a film or a novel with a woman protagonist (Up the Down Staircase, for example) as counterpoint to one featuring a male teacher (Blackboard Jungle) or The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie balanced against Dead Poets Society.

The portrayals of teachers, like all images a culture presents of itself, reveal much about our private and social selves. Keroes points out authentic accounts of authoritative women teachers who are admired and respected by colleagues and students alike. Real teachers differ from the stereotypes we see in fiction and film, however. Male teachers are often portrayed as heroes in film and fallibly human in fiction, whereas women in either genre are likely to be monstrous or muddled and are virtually never women of color. Among other things, Keroes demonstrates, the tension between reality and representation reveals society's ambivalence about power in the hands of women.

“This is a book about the American Dream as it has become embodied in the university in general and in the English department in particular,” writes James Ray Watkins at the start of A Taste for Language: Literacy, Class, and English Studies. In it, Watkins argues that contemporary economic and political challenges require a clear understanding of the identity of English studies, making elementary questions about literacy, language, literature, education, and class once again imperative.  

A personal history of university-level English studies in the twentieth century, A Taste for Language combines biography, autobiography, and critical analysis to explore the central role of freshman English and literary studies in the creation and maintenance of the middle class. It tells a multi-generational story of the author and his father, intertwined with close reading of texts and historical analysis. The story moves from depression-era Mississippi, where the author's father was born, to a contemporary English department, where the author now teaches.

Watkins looks at not only textbooks, scholars, and the academy but also at families and other social institutions. A rich combination of biography, autobiography, and critical analysis, A Taste for Language questions what purpose an education in English language and literature serves in the lives of the educated in a class-based society and whether English studies has become wholly irrelevant in the twenty-first century. 

Through these essays—which deal with Bowles’s published as well as her unpublished work—Skerl seeks to generate serious critical attention for an important but neglected female experimental writer of the mid-twentieth century and to celebrate her originality, power, and craft.

Based in disciplines and theoretical approaches that range from feminist criticism to Middle Eastern studies, from postmodernism to queer theory, and from Victorianism to the Beat Generation, the essayists naturally approach Bowles’s fiction and drama from a wide variety of critical perspectives. All of these essays are unpublished and written for this volume.

Drawing on decades of teaching experience and the collective wisdom of dozens of the most creative theorists in the country, Michael R. Rogers’ s diverse survey of music theory— one of the first to comprehensively survey and evaluate the teaching styles, techniques, and materials used in theory courses— is a unique reference and research tool for teachers, theorists, secondary and postsecondary students, and for private study. This revised edition of Teaching Approaches in Music Theory: An Overview of Pedagogical Philosophies features an extensive updated bibliography encompassing the years since the volume was first published in 1984.           

 

In a new preface to this edition, Rogers references advancements in the field over the past two decades, from the appearance of the first scholarly journal devoted entirely to aspects of music theory education to the emergence of electronic advances and devices that will provide a supporting, if not central, role in the teaching of music theory in the foreseeable future. With the updated information, the text continues to provide an excellent starting point for the study of music theory pedagogy.             

 

Rogers has organized the book very much like a sonata. Part one, “ Background,” delineates principal ideas and themes, acquaints readers with the author’ s views of contemporary musical theory, and includes an orientation to an eclectic range of philosophical thinking on the subject; part two, “ Thinking and Listening,” develops these ideas in the specific areas of mindtraining and analysis, including a chapter on ear training; and part three, “ Achieving Teaching Success,” recapitulates main points in alternate contexts and surroundings and discusses how they can be applied to teaching and the evaluation of design and curriculum.             

 

Teaching Approaches in Music Theory emphasizes thoughtful examination and critique of the underlying and often tacit assumptions behind textbooks, materials, and technologies. Consistently combining general methods with specific examples and both philosophical and practical reasoning, Rogers compares and contrasts pairs of concepts and teaching approaches, some mutually exclusive and some overlapping. The volume is enhanced by extensive suggested reading lists for each chapter.

Formulaic ways to train students in composition and rhetoric are no longer effective, say authors Robert L. Davis and Mark F. Shadle. Scholar-teachers must instead reinvent the field from the inside. Teaching Multiwriting: Researching and Composing with Multiple  Genres, Media, Disciplines, and Cultures presents just such a reinvention with multiwriting, an alternative, open approach to composition. Seeking to open the minds of both writers and readers to new understandings, the authors argue for the supplanting of the outdated research paper assignment with research projects that use multiple forms to explore questions that cannot be fully answered.

 

This innovative volume, geared to composition teachers at all levels, includes sixteen helpful illustrations and provides classroom exercises and projects for each chapter.

Edited by Nathan Stucky and Cynthia Wimmer, Teaching Performance Studies is the first organized treatment of performance studies theory, practice, and pedagogy. This collection of eighteen essays by leading scholars and educators reflects the emergent and contested nature of performance studies, a field that looks at the broad range of human performance from everyday conversation to formal theatre and cultural ritual. The cross-disciplinary freedom enacted by the writers suggests a new vision of performance studies—a deliberate commerce between field and classroom.

   

Classrooms filled with glassy-eyed students provide an experiential base for Alice S. Horning’s new com­prehensive theory about basic writers.

Horning explores the theory of writing acquisi­tion in detail. Her examination of spoken and writ­ten language and redundancy give a theoretical base to her argument that academic discourse is a sepa­rate linguistic system characterized by particular psycholinguistic features. She proposes that basic writ­ers learn to write as other learners master a second language because for them, academic written Eng­lish is a whole new language.

She explores the many connections to be found in second language acquisition research to the teaching and learning of writing and gives special attention to the interlanguage hypothesis, pidginization theory, and the Monitor theory. She also addresses the role of affective factors (feelings, attitudes, emotions, and motivation) in the success or failure of writing students.

Teaching Writing: Landmarks and Horizons, edited by Christina Russell McDonald and Robert L. McDonald, is designed to present an overview of some of the major developments in the establishment of composition studies as a field during the past thirty-five years. The essays are theoretically grounded but are focused on pedagogy as well. Divided into two parts, the first presents nine landmark essays, selected and introduced by distinguished composition scholars, and the second brings together eight new essays by emerging scholars.

Teaching/Writing in Thirdspaces: The Studio Approach examines a dynamic approach to teaching composition that reimagines not only the physical space in which writing and learning occurs but also the place occupied by composition in the power structure of universities and colleges. 

In response to financial and programmatic cutbacks at the University of South Carolina in the 1990s, authors Rhonda C. Grego and Nancy S. Thompson used their academic backgrounds in composition and English education, along with their personal histories in working-class families, to look at compositional spaces and places with an eye to challenging the embedded issues of race, class, and gender within the university hierarchies.  The result was a supplemental writing program that they called the writing studio.

The studio model emphasizes individual participation in a small group that allows students to present work they are preparing for outside classes, discuss their challenges, and refine their ideas with other students and staff facilitators.  This “interactional inquiry” is replicated and reinforced by the facilitators, who meet in their own small groups to analyze larger patterns, possibilities, and needs as they arise in their studios.

Grego and Thompson argue that because the studio is physically and institutionally “outside but alongside” both students’ other coursework and the hierarchy of the institution, it represents a “thirdspace,” a unique position in which to effect institutional change.  The focus on interactional inquiry challenges traditional power hierarchies within classrooms and shifts the nature of discourse. As a bottom-up approach to the development of educational programs within institutions that have different needs, demographies, and histories, the studio model can address a multitude of different institutional needs with little disruption to the curriculum.

The studio model allows university administrators, teachers, student aides, and students to continually adapt to changing institutional environments with new teaching and learning strategies.  Teaching/Writing in Thirdspaces provides an alternative approach to traditional basic writing courses that can be adopted in educational institutions of all types and at all levels.

Part critique of existing policy and practice, part call-to-action, Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century explores the complex linkage between technology and literacy that has come to characterize American culture and its public educational system at the end of the twentieth century.

To provide a specific case study of this complex cultural formation, award-winning educator Cynthia L. Selfe discusses the Technology Literacy Challenge, an official, federally sponsored literacy project begun in 1996 that has changed—at fundamentally important levels—the definition of literacy and the practices recognized as constituting literate behavior in America. Selfe tries to identify the effects of this new literacy agenda, focusing specifically on what she calls "serious and shameful" inequities it fosters in our culture and in the public education system: among them, the continuing presence of racism, poverty, and illiteracy. 

She describes how the national project to expand technological literacy came about, what effects it has yielded, why the American public has supported this project, and how teachers of English, language arts, and composition have contributed to this project, despite their best intentions.

A primary goal of this study is to make teachers of English and composition increasingly aware of the new literacy agenda and to suggest how they might positively influence its shape and future direction, both in the classroom and in the community. This awareness is an integral part of educators' larger professional responsibility to understand the way in which our culture thinks about and values literacy. Perhaps even more important, argues Selfe, this awareness is part of teachers' ethical responsibility to understand how literacy and literacy instruction directly and continually affect the lived experiences of the individuals and families with whom teachers interact.

 

Supplemented by recollections from the present era, Tell Us a Story is a colorful mosaic of African American autobiography and family history set in Springfield, Illinois, and in rural southern Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas from the 1920s through the 1950s.

           

Shirley Motley Portwood shares rural, African American family and community history through a collection of vignettes about the Motley family. Initially transcribed accounts of the Motleys’ rich oral history, these stories have been passed among family members for nearly fifty years. In addition to her personal memories, Portwood presents interviews with her father, three brothers, and two sisters plus notes and recollections from their annual family reunions. The result is a composite view of the Motley family.

           

A historian, Portwood enhances the Motley family story by investigating primary data such as census, marriage, school, and land records, newspaper accounts, city directories, and other sources. The backbone of this saga, however, is oral history gathered from five generations, extending back to Portwood's grandparents, born more than one hundred years ago. Information regarding two earlier generations—her great- grandfather and great-great-grandparents, who were slaves—is based on historical research into state archives, county and local records, plantation records, and manuscript censuses.

           

A rich source for this material—the Motley family reunions—are week-long retreats where four generations gather at the John Motley house in Burlington, Connecticut, the Portwood home in Godfrey, Illinois, or other locations. Here the Motleys, all natural storytellers, pass on the family traditions. The stories, ranging from humorous to poignant, reveal much about the culture and history of African Americans, especially those from nonurban areas. Like many rural African Americans, the Motleys have a rich and often joyful family history with traditions reaching back to the slave past. They have known the harsh poverty that made even the necessities difficult to obtain and the racial prejudice that divided whites and blacks during the era of Jim Crow segregation and inequality; yet they have kept a tremendous faith in self-improvement through hard work and education.

           

Former FBI agent Jim Fisher upends the genteel racket of fee-based literary agents and vanity publishers in this searing look at the rise and fall of one bogus entrepreneur who systematically swindled thousands of would-be writers out of millions of dollars with promises of having their work turned into salable books. In divulging the details of this colossal and shocking confidence game, Ten Percent of Nothing: The Case of the Literary Agent from Hell exposes a growing and serious crime against writers and a dark, ugly secret about the American publishing industry.

In 1989, Dorothy L. Deering, possessing a high school degree, a recent embezzlement conviction, and no experience as a professional writer, editor, or publisher, began operating a fee-based literary agency out of her garage in Nicholasville, Kentucky. Over the next ten years, she racked up a fortune in reading and marketing fees, learning the business of sham publishing as she went along. Later, as the owner of a vanity press, she bilked 1.5 million dollars out of her clients, masterfully manufacturing dreams of literary success until she was brought to justice by Fisher’s investigative journalism, an FBI probe, and the retaliation and testimonies of numerous victims.

Deering never sold a single manuscript to a major publisher. With the money in her pocket and her clients’ hopes and hard work wrapped up in fraudulent contracts, Deering produced a few copies of four cheaply printed, poorly edited paperbacks. These she used as bait to hoodwink more clients. She was abetted by her husband, Charles, a former car salesman; his son, Daniel, a drug user with a ninth-grade education; and her brother, Bill, a fugitive from the law at the time he headed her vanity press.

            

By successfully impersonating a literary agent for ten years, Deering operated one of the longest-running confidence games in American history. The financial loss for her clients was devastating, and the heartbreak was extreme. Drawing on victims’ experiences and documents recovered from the Deering venture, Fisher shows how Deering engineered and executed her scam, emphasizing the warning signs of sham agents, crook book doctors, and mendacious publishers.

Ten Percent of Nothing provides essential information for aspiring writers and publishing professionals. Fisher’s findings also prompt new inquiries into the potential licensing of literary agents and the prosecution of interstate scam artists. The volume’s gallery of illustrations includes reproductions of correspondence, newsletters, and advertisements used by the Deering operation.

With authority and sensitivity Plotkin traces the close relationship between Hopkins’ s poetry and the theories of language suggested in his Journals and expounded by Victorian philologists such as Max Mü ller and George Marsh.



Plotkin seeks to determine what changed Hopkins’ s perception of language between the writing of such early poems as "The Habit of Perfection" and "Nondum" (1866) and his creation of The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875– 76). Did the language of the ode, and of Hopkins’ s mature poetry generally, arise as spontaneously as it appears to have done, or does it have a traceable genesis in the ways in which language as a whole was conceived and studied in mid-century England? In answer, Plotkin fixes the development of Hopkins’ s singular poetic language in the philological context of his time.



If one is to understand Hopkins’ s writings and poetic language in the context in which they developed rather than in the terms of a present-day theory of history or textuality, then that movement in all of its complexity must be considered. Hopkins "translates" into the language of poetry patterns and categories common to Victorian language study.

Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers: Writing Instruction in the Managed University exposes the poor working conditions of contingent composition faculty and explores practical alternatives to the unfair labor practices that are all too common on campuses today.

          

Editors Marc Bousquet, Tony Scott, and Leo Parascondola bring together diverse perspectives from pragmatism to historical materialism to provide a perceptive and engaging examination of the nature, extent, and economics of the managed labor problem in composition instruction—a field in which as much as ninety-three percent  of all classes are taught by graduate students, adjuncts, and other “disposable” teachers. These instructors enjoy few benefits, meager wages, little or no participation in departmental governance, and none of the rewards and protections that encourage innovation and research. And it is from this disenfranchised position that literacy workers are expected to provide some of the core instruction in nearly everyone's higher education experience.

            

Twenty-six contributors explore a range of real-world solutions to managerial domination of the composition workplace, from traditional academic unionism to ensemble movement activism and the pragmatic rhetoric, accommodations, and resistances practiced by teachers in their daily lives. 

Contributors are Leann Bertoncini, Marc Bousquet, Christopher Carter, Christopher Ferry, David Downing, Amanda Godley, Robin Truth Goodman, Bill Hendricks, Walter Jacobsohn, Ruth Kiefson, Paul Lauter, Donald Lazere, Eric Marshall, Randy Martin, Richard Ohmann, Leo Parascondola, Steve Parks, Gary Rhoades, Eileen Schell, Tony Scott, William Thelin, Jennifer Seibel Trainor, Donna Strickland, William Vaughn, Ray Watkins, and Katherine Wills.

The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film examines the importance of rhetoric in the study of film and film theory. Rhetorical approaches to film studies have been widely practiced, but rarely discussed until now. Taking on such issues as Hollywood blacklisting, fascistic aesthetics, and postmodern dialogics, editor David Blakesley presents fifteen critical essays that examine rhetoric’s role in such popular films as The Fifth Element, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Usual Suspects, Deliverance, The English Patient, Pulp Fiction, The Music Man, Copycat, Hoop Dreams,and A Time to Kill.

Aided by sixteen illustrations, these insightful essays consider films rhetorically, as ways of seeing and not seeing, as acts that dramatize how people use language and images to tell stories and foster identification.

Contributors include David Blakesley, Alan Nadel, Ann Chisholm, Martin J. Medhurst, Byron Hawk, Ekaterina V. Haskins, James Roberts, Thomas W. Benson, Philip L. Simpson, Davis W. Houck, Caroline J.S. Picart, Friedemann Weidauer, Bruce Krajewski, Harriet Malinowitz, Granetta L. Richardson, and Kelly Ritter.

This is the first book-length study of the status of composition in English studies and the uneasy relationship between composition and literature. Composition studies and institutional histories of English studies have long needed this kind of clarification of the historical and political contexts of composition teaching, research, and administration.



Susan Miller argues that composition constitutes a major national industry, citing the four million freshman-level students enrolled in such courses each year, the $40 million annual expenditure for textbooks, and the more than $50 million in teacher salaries. But this concrete magnitude is not expressed in political power within departments. Miller calls on her associates in composition to engage in a persistent critique of the social practices and political agenda of the discipline that have been responsible for its institutional marginalization. Drawing on her own long experience as a composition administrator, teacher, and scholar, as well as on a national survey of composition professionals, Miller argues that composition teachers inadvertently continue to foster the negative myth about composition’ s place in the English studies hierarchy by assuming an assigned, self-sacrificial cultural identity. Composition has been regarded as subcollegiate, practical, a "how-to," and has been denied intellectual rigor in order to preserve literature’ s presentations of quasi-religious textual ideals.

In this first book-length biography of Mercedes de Acosta, theatre historian Robert A. Schanke adroitly mines lost archival materials and mixes in his own interviews with de Acosta’ s intimates to correct established myths and at last construct an accurate, detailed, and vibrant portrait of the flamboyantly uninhibited early-twentieth-century author, poet, and playwright.

            

Born to wealthy Spanish immigrants, Mercedes de Acosta (1893– 1968) lived in opulence and traveled in the same social circles as the Astors and Vanderbilts. Introduced to the New York theater scene at an early age, her dual loves of performance and of women informed every aspect of her life thereafter. Alice B. Toklas’ s observation, “ Say what you will about Mercedes, she’ s had the most important women in the twentieth century,” was well justified, as her romantic conquests included such internationally renowned beauties as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Isadora Duncan, and Eva Le Gallienne as well as Alla Nazimova, Tamara Karsavina, Pola Negri, and Ona Munson.

            

More than a record of her personal life and infamous romances, this account offers the first analysis of the complete oeuvre of de Acosta’ s literary works, including three volumes of poetry, two novels, two film scripts, and a dozen plays. Although only two of her plays were ever published during her lifetime, four of them were produced, featuring such stage luminaries as John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, and Eva Le Gallienne. Critics praised her first volume of poetry, Moods, in 1919 and predicted her rise to literary fame, but the love of other women that fueled her writing also limited her opportunities to fulfill this destiny. Failing to achieve any lasting fame, she died in relative poverty at the age of seventy-five.

 

De Acosta lived her desires publicly with verve and vigor at a time when few others would dare, and for that, she paid the price of marginalized obscurity. Until now. With “ That Furious Lesbian” Schanke at last establishes Mercedes de Acosta’ s rightful place as a pioneer— and indeed a champion— in the early struggle for lesbian rights in this country. 

 

Robert A. Schanke has edited a companion to this biography, Women in Turmoil: Six Plays by Mercedes de Acosta, also available from Southern Illinois University Press.

The Theatre of Sabina Berman: The Agony of Ecstasy and Other Plays introduces and makes accessible to an English-speaking audience the work of the contemporary Mexican playwright Sabina Berman. The book contains translations of the four plays that established Berman’ s career: The Agony of Ecstasy, Yankee, Puzzle, and Heresy. An introduction by Adam Versé nyi provides a critical assessment of each play, a discussion of the specific problems of translation involved, and placement of Berman’ s work in the larger Mexican and Latin American context.

           

It is evident that Sabina Berman’ s theatrical acumen matches the depth of her dramatic design whether it is the sheer variety of techniques from song to staged tableau that appear in The Agony of Ecstasy; the physicalization of what it means to be interrogated and to interrogate in Yankee; the final enigmatic image of a soldier alone on stage, silently aiming his firearm at an undefined threat that potentially emanates from the audience in Puzzle; or the manner in which the family narrates its own “ heretical” actions in Heresy. It is the combination of theatrical technique with universal themes of self-definition that cuts across cultures and ultimately makes these plays translatable.

Theatrical Scene Painting: A Lesson Guide, second edition, is a practical guide to scene painting for students and novices, as well as a reference for intermediate scene painters who wish to refresh or supplement their basic skills.  Drawing on his extensive teaching and scene-painting experience, William H. Pinnell clarifies and expands on the lessons of the first edition, providing a detailed overview of the fundamentals of traditional scene painting. 

The guide not only covers the basic tools of the trade and various methods of creating texture on scenery but also includes more advanced techniques for scene making, beginning with stonework, woodwork, and wallpaper before moving on to the more intricate techniques of moldings, paneling, drapery, foliage, shiny metal, perspective illusions, scale transfers, scenic drops, and scrims.  Pinnell also includes refinements and embellishments that can lead to the development of personal style without sacrificing the goal of realism and more advanced work. Alternative methods to achieve different effects are also featured.

Theatrical Scene Painting: A Lesson Guide was the first book of its kind to provide clear step-by-step instructions in how to paint a wide variety of basic and advanced effects commonly needed for the theater. This new edition clarifies the origins of painting techniques and is supplemented with clearer step-by-step descriptions, new instructional photographs, and drawings that illustrate each major step.  This edition also includes additional painting projects and their possible variations, a gallery of nineteen examples of professional scenic works, and an expanded glossary to eliminate confusion in terms.

Useful to both self-taught artists and students, each lesson in the guide can be a stand-alone topic or can form the foundation for a student to build skills for increasingly complex techniques.

The second edition of Theatrical Scene Painting provides many new essential scene painting projects in a clearer format, broadens the scope of the painting examples, and includes updated methods as well as new lessons. This clear and easily accessible guide gives students the ability to put together recognizable illusions.

 

This handbook explains the techniques of traditional scene painting. A “how to” book for the novice, it shows the methods used in creating the illusion of three dimensions where only two exist. It provides a step-by-step explanation of each aspect of scene painting, using both color and black-and-white photographs for illustration.

Among the many illusions made possible through the magic of paint are stonework, wallpaper, woodwork, as well as mouldings, draperies, and foliage. To teach the beginner how to re-create reality through painted illusion, Pinnell emphasizes traditional scene painting, including basic tools, primary painting techniques, and methods for creating texture on scenery. He also illustrates refinements and embellishments that lead to more advanced work.

Through diagrams, sketches, and mod­els, along with explications of the essen­tial tools and materials required, Payne defines and delineates the precise step-by-step procedures of scenographic mod­elmaking: the basic preparations of con­struction, the process of making the model, and the experimental aspects of modelmaking. This new edition with 50 additional illustrations and other new information offers teachers, students, and beginning professionals alike a com­plete and comprehensive approach to creating and constructing the sceno­graphic model.

In his first book devoted exclusively to naturalism, Donald Pizer brings together thirteen essays and four reviews written over a thirty-year period that in their entirety constitute a full-scale interpretation of the basic character and historical shape of naturalism in America.

The essays fall into three groups. Some deal with the full range of American naturalism, from the 1590s to the late twentieth century, and some are confined either to the 1890s or to the twentieth century. In addition to the essays, an introduction in which Pizer recounts the development of his interest in American naturalism, reviews of recent studies of naturalism, and a selected bibliography contribute to an understanding of Pizer’s interpretation of the movement.

One of the recurrent themes in the essays is that the interpretation of American naturalism has been hindered by the common view that the movement is characterized by a commitment to Emile Zola’s deterministic beliefs and that naturalistic novels are thus inevitably crude and simplistic both in theme and method. Rather than accept this notion, Pizer insists that naturalistic novels be read closely not for their success or failure in rendering obvious deterministic beliefs but rather for what actually does occur within the dynamic play of theme and form within the work.

Adopting this method, Pizer finds that naturalistic fiction often reveals a complex and suggestive mix of older humanistic faiths and more recent doubts about human volition, and that it renders this vital thematic ambivalence in increasingly sophisticated forms as the movement matures. In addition, Pizer demonstrates that American naturalism cannot be viewed monolithically as a school with a common body of belief and value. Rather, each generation of American naturalists, as well as major figures within each generation, has responded to threads within the naturalistic impulse in strikingly distinctive ways. And it is indeed this absence of a rigid doctrinal core and the openness of the movement to individual variation that are responsible for the remarkable vitality and longevity of the movement.

Because the essays have their origin in efforts to describe the general characteristics of American naturalism rather than in a desire to cover the field fully, some authors and works are discussed several times (though from different angles) and some referred to only briefly or notat all. But the essays as a collection are "complete" in the sense that they comprise an interpretation of American naturalism both in its various phases and as a whole. Those authors whose works receive substantial discussion include Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James T. Farrell, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, and William Kennedy. Of special interest is Pizer’s essay on Ironweed, which appears here for the first time.

H. Lewis Ulman here examines the roles of language theory in eighteenth-century British rhetorics, linking those roles to philosophical issues informing twentieth-century rhetorical theory. In doing so, Ulman develops a general model of the "problem of language" for rhetorical theory, a model that transcends the impasse between realism and skepticism that marks both eighteenth- and twentieth-century rhetorical theory.



The nature of language was never more central to rhetorical theory than in the second half of the eighteenth century. Yet, until now, the articulation of theories of language and the arts of rhetoric in eighteenth-century Britain has received little attention. Ulman examines the role of grammar and theories of language in the formation of eighteenth-century rhetorical theory, investigating the significance of language theory for such key concerns of eighteenth-century rhetoric as verbal criticism, style, and elocution. His study highlights what he understands as the central motive of late eighteenth-century British rhetoricians— to construct for their particular cultural context philosophically rigorous accounts of verbal communication based on carefully articulated theories of thought and language.



Toward this end, Ulman examines three eighteenth-century British rhetorical treatises: George Campbell’ s Philosophy of Rhetoric, Hugh Blair’ s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, and Thomas Sheridan’ s Course of Lectures on Elocution. He then identifies the continuities and discontinuities between the problem of language for eighteenth- and twentieth-century rhetorical theory and proposes a pluralistic stance toward the problem of language in rhetoric as an alternative to the theoretical standoff that currently characterizes the debate between realist and antirealist rhetorics.

A mosaic of memories, the poems of This Country of Mothers recollect Julianna Baggott’s experiences as both mother and daughter. With wit, compassion, aggression, and anxiety, Baggott examines her maternal history. She recalls moments of creation and destruction in her life, times of elation and of desperation that mold her as both a woman and a poet. This affecting study of motherhood is framed in issues of Catholicism and of poetry itself, challenging and espousing the roles of both. Throughout her poems, Baggott’s personal experiences embrace universal themes to birth poems in a language and style that is both powerfully feminine and accessibly human.

Jennifer Richter presents a series of poems that explore the many facets of the term "threshold." Throughout the collection, the narrator experiences several acts of threshing, or separating—from birth and the small yet profound distances that part a mother and child, to the separation caused by illness and its toll on relationships. At the same time, she is progressively gathering, piecing together the remnants of her life, collecting her children into her arms, and welcoming a future without pain. Pain is often present in these poems, as the narrator frequently confronts her own threshold for enduring a ravaging illness. Her harrowing struggle through recovery is chronicled by a poem at the end of each section, tracing her powerful journey from deep suffering to a fragile yet steadfast sense of hope.
     These gripping lyric and prose poems explore duality in its many forms: the private, contemplative world versus a world of action; the mirror sides of health and sickness; the warmth of a June sun and the deep, long nights of winter; mother and child; collecting and letting go. From the comfort of a morning bed at home to the desperate streets of Hanoi, Threshold is a searing portrait of healing, the courage it takes to bridge the gulfs that divide, and the wonder of the ties that bind.

What Is My Body Without You?

My son’s pajamas unsnapped

on the floor: small husk

of his body relaxing on its back,

legs and sleeves still filled

with his rush.  This part of him

hasn’t outgrown my arms

and sometimes lets me lift

him up our steep stairs,

carry him to bed and pull

his shade against the gray

thin winter sky like milk

my daughter wakes up wanting. 

In the last days of lifting her

to my breast, I fill her less

than the air already gone

from my son’s flat shape.

Twice like that I have lain back,

the doctor opening me

along the same clean seam. 

Each time I was watching:

with a few tugs the child

was out, naked and heading

toward other hands, each child

cut loose before I knew it.

Elmer Gertz has defended famous people—including Henry Miller, Nathan Leopold, and Jack Ruby—and he has become famous in his own right through his struggle for civil liberties and personal rights.

Gertz has taken on a lengthy list of cases and causes over the six decades of his legal career. He fought successfully against the censorship of Henry Miller’s book Tropic of Cancer,which had been banned in Chicago for obscenity. He got Nathan Leopold released from prison after Leopold had served 34 years for his part in the death of 14-year-old Bobby Franks. An ardent foe of the death penalty, Gertz labored for years as part of a national team of lawyers that was finally able to overturn Jack Ruby’s death sentence for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Gertz’s cases have helped make libel law in the nation.

For this edition, Gertz adds an afterword that covers the 15 years since the book’s first publication. Gertz talks of Henry Miller’s last days and his travels to the USSR on behalf of the Refuseniks.

Martin Blumenson refers to this book as a “sensitive, beautifully written personal memoir,” and calls it a contribution to under­standing, “particularly to Americans who know little of how World War II and its immediate aftermath disrupted the lives of those who survived the defeat of Germany.”

Vividly, humanly, Shelton tells her story from the point of view of a teen-age German girl, one who witnessed her country’s surge to power and who felt the ignominy of both Germany and Ger­mans after the fall. She reaches a point during the war when “Sometimes the way we now live seems unreal, as if we were marionettes, with orders and permits and schedules attached to us instead of strings.”

But after the defeat of Germany life gets considerably worse. The victorious Russians evict the natives from their homes. They sneer and leer at the women who must venture forth for food. In this defeated land “the nights become unbearably long; without any physical activity by day, sleep refuses to come. I yearn for sleep, be it temporary or eternal. Death is becoming a friend; the enemy has a new name now: Rape.”

Then comes the dreaded order to evacuate all Germans from Lower Silesia: “How can a whole people be uprooted, disowned, tossed aside like useless flotsam—how? With the stroke of a pen, with a new line drawn on a map, we are sentenced to homelessness.” Not knowing where they will be sent, they plod out into darkness and cold with the other Germans, their worldly goods reduced to what they can carry. Embittered, they are herded into vermin-infested freight cars, still unaware of their destination.

Crooked politicians, gangsters, madams, and cops on the take: To Serve and Collect tells the story of Chicago during its formative years through the history of its legendary police department.



 



 

“The mature writer is recognized ... by his ability to create a flow of sentences, a pattern of thought that is produced, one suspects, according to the principles of yet another kind of grammar—a grammar, let us say, of passages.”—Mina Shaughnessy

Richard M. Coe has developed such a “grammar,” one which uses a simple graphic instrument to analyze the meaningful relationships between sentences in a passage and to clarify the function of structure in discourse. Working in the tradition of Christensen’s generative rhetoric, Coe presents a two-dimensional graphic matrix that effectively analyzes the logical relations between statements by mapping coordinate, subordinate, and superordinate relationships.

Coe demonstrates the power of his discourse matrix by applying it to a variety of significant problems, such as how to demonstrate discourse differences between cultures (especially between Chinese and English), how to explain precisely what is “bad” about the structure of passages that do not work, and how best to teach structure. This new view of the structure of passages helps to articulate crucial questions about the relations between form and function, language, thought and culture, cognitive and social processes.

Current rhetorical and critical theory for the most part separates writing from consciousness and presumes relative truth to be the only possible expressive goal for rhetoric. These presumptions are reflected in our tradition of persuasive rhetoric, which values writing that successfully argues one person’s belief at the expense of another’s. Barbara Couture presents a case for a phenomenological rhetoric, one that values and respects consciousness and selfhood and that restores to rhetoric the possibility of seeking an all-embracing truth through pacific and cooperative interaction.

Couture discusses the premises on which current interpretive theory has supported relative truth as the philosophical grounding for rhetoric, premises, she argues, that have led to constraints on our notion of truth that divorce it from human experience. She then shows how phenomenological philosophy might guide the theory and practice of rhetoric, reanimating its role in the human enterprise of seeking a shared truth. She proposes profession and altruism as two guiding metaphors for the phenomenological activity of "truth-seeking through interaction."

Among the contemporary rhetoricians and philosophers who influence Couture are Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Buber, Charles Altieri, Charles Taylor, Alasdair Maclntyre, and Jürgen Habermas.

Calling upon two cultures, Vandana Khanna’s Train to Agra meditates on the effects of displacement and expatriation on the construction of a young Indian American woman’s identity. The physical journeys undertaken by the speaker reflect her inner journey from immigrant child to Indian American woman, struggling to find her place between India and America, Krishna and Jesus, samosas and hamburgers. The speaker constantly tries to recapture visions, smells, and sounds of her childhood and her travels, but cannot do so without imagination. Her memory fails her, so through metaphor she invents her past as it should have been. Traveling through her reflections on childhood, fate, faith, death, and belonging, she comes to accept her reality as a construct of lived memories and wished-for fantasies.  

Troping the Body: Gender, Etiquette, and Performance is an interdisciplinary study of etiquette texts, conduct literature, and advice books and films. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster analyzes the work of such women authors as Emily Post, Christine de Pizan, Hannah Webster Foster, Emily Brontë , Frances E. W. Harper, and Martha Stewart as well as such women filmmakers as Lois Weber and Kasi Lemmons.
            
“ Specifically,” Foster notes, “ I was interested in the possibility of locating power and agency in the voices of popular etiquette writers.” Her investigation led her to analyze etiquette and conduct literature from the Middle Ages to the present. Within this wide scope, she redefines the boundaries of conduct literature through a theoretical examination of the gendered body as it is positioned in conduct books, etiquette texts, poetry, fiction, and film.
 
Drawing on Bakhtin, Gates, Foucault, and the new school of performative feminism to develop an interdisciplinary approach to conduct literature— and literature as conduct— Foster brings a unique perspective to the analysis of ways in which the body has been gendered, raced, and constructed in terms of class and sexuality.
            
Even though women writers have been actively writing conduct and etiquette texts since the medieval period, few critical examinations of such literature exist in the fields of cultural studies and literary criticism. Thus, Foster’ s study fills a gap and does so uniquely in the existing literature. In examining these voices of authority over the body, Foster identifies the dialogic in the texts of this discipline that both supports and disrupts the hegemonic discourse of a gendered social order.

Trust in Texts: A Different History of Rhetoric challenges the accepted idea of a singular rhetorical tradition poorly maintained from the Athenian Golden Age until the present. Author Susan Miller argues that oratorical rhetoric is but one among many codes that guide the production of texts and proposes that emotion and trust are central to the motives and effects of rhetoric.

This groundbreaking volume makes a case for historical rhetoric as disbursed, formal and informal lessons in persuasion that are codified as crafts that mediate between what is known and unknown in particular rhetorical situations. Traditional, unified histories of rhetoric ignore the extensive historical interactions among discourses—including medicine, drama, lyric poetry, philosophy, oratory, and literary fiction—that have operated from antiquity across cultures that are historically and geographically joined.

Drawing not just on traditional rhetorical works, but also on texts from philosophy and literature, Miller expands the body of works to be considered in the study of rhetoric. As the first book-length study that calls into question the centrality of logos to rhetoric, Trust in Texts will change the way the history of rhetoric is viewed and taught and will be essential to scholars and students of communications, rhetoric, English, classics, and literary studies.

Scorned by critics since birth, decreed dead by many, naturalism, according to Donald Pizer, is “one of the most persistent and vital strains in American fiction, perhaps the only modern literary form in America that has been both popular and significant.”

To define naturalism and explain its tena­cious hold throughout the twentieth century on the American creative imagination, Pizer explores six novels: James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, John Dos Passos’s U.S.A., John Stein­beck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, and Saul Bellow’s The Adven­tures of Augie March.

Pizer’s approach to these novels is empiri­cal; he does not wrench each novel awk­wardly until it fits his framework of general­izations and principles; rather, he approaches the novels as fiction and arrives at his defini­tion through his close reading of the works.

Establishing the background of natural­ism, Pizer explains that it comes under attack because it is “sordid and sensational in sub­ject matter,” it challenges “man’s faith in his innate moral sense and thus his responsibility for his actions,” and it is so full of “social documentation” that it is often dismissed as little more than a photographic record of a life or an era; thus the “aesthetic valid­ity of the naturalistic novel has often been questioned.”

Pizer posits the 1890s, the 1930s,and the late 1940s as the decades when naturalism flourished in America. He concentrates on literary criticism, not on the philosophy ofnaturalism, to show that literary criticism can make a contribution to a particularly muddled area of literary history—a natural­ism that is alive and changing, thus resisting the neat definitions reserved for the dead.

Self-help authors like Tom Peters and Stephen Covey, who have dominated best-seller lists over the last two decades, have exercised increasing influence on political, governmental, and educational organizations. By contrast, the topic of American success books— texts that promise to help readers succeed by retrofitting their identity to meet workplace demands— has been ignored by scholars since the 1980s. John Ramage challenges the neglect of this hugely popular literature and revives a once-lively conversation among eminent critics about the social phenomenon represented in the work of Bruce Barton, Dale Carnegie, and Norman Vincent Peale, among others.



Using literary texts from Don Quixote to Catch-22 to gloss the discussion, Ramage utilizes Kenneth Burke’ s rhetorical theory to understand symbolic acts and social issues and brings together earlier commentaries within a new critical framework. He considers the problematic and paradoxical nature of success and examines its meaning in terms of its traditional dialectic partner, happiness. A synopsis of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century forerunners prefaces this analysis in which Ramage links literary code heroes with the activities of twentieth-century business leaders to determine whether, in the search for authenticity, the heroic individual or the corporation is ultimately served.



This comprehensive study chronicles the legitimation of the success book genre, enumerates rhetorical strategies used to win over readers, and supplies the historical context that renders each book’ s message timely. After considering some of the dangers of crossing disciplinary borders, as exemplified by Deborah Tannen’ s work, Ramage critiques Stanley Fish’ s theoretical strictures against this practice, finally summoning academic critics to action with a strong call to exert greater influence within the popular marketplace.