Video and computer games in their cultural contexts.
As the popularity of computer games has exploded over the past decade, both scholars and game industry professionals have recognized the necessity of treating games less as frivolous entertainment and more as artifacts of culture worthy of political, social, economic, rhetorical, and aesthetic analysis. Ken McAllister notes in his introduction to Game Work that, even though games are essentially impractical, they are nevertheless important mediating agents for the broad exercise of socio-political power.
In considering how the languages, images, gestures, and sounds of video games influence those who play them, McAllister highlights the ways in which ideology is coded into games. Computer games, he argues, have transformative effects on the consciousness of players, like poetry, fiction, journalism, and film, but the implications of these transformations are not always clear. Games can work to maintain the status quo or celebrate liberation or tolerate enslavement, and they can conjure feelings of hope or despair, assent or dissent, clarity or confusion. Overall, by making and managing meanings, computer games—and the work they involve and the industry they spring from—are also negotiating power.
This book sets out a method for "recollecting" some of the diverse and copious influences on computer games and the industry they have spawned. Specifically written for use in computer game theory classes, advanced media studies, and communications courses, Game Work will also be welcome by computer gamers and designers.
Ken S. McAllister is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona and Co-Director of the Learning Games Initiative, a research collective that studies, teaches with, and builds computer games.
Nan Johnson demonstrates that after the Civil War, nonacademic or “parlor” traditions of rhetorical performance helped to sustain the icon of the white middle class woman as queen of her domestic sphere by promoting a code of rhetorical behavior for women that required the performance of conventional femininity. Through a lucid examination of the boundaries of that gendered rhetorical space—and the debate about who should occupy that space—Johnson explores the codes governing and challenging the American woman’s proper rhetorical sphere in the postbellum years.
While men were learning to preach, practice law, and set political policies, women were reading elocution manuals, letter-writing handbooks, and other conduct literature. These texts reinforced the conservative message that women’s words mattered, but mattered mostly in the home. Postbellum pedagogical materials were designed to educate Americans in rhetorical skills, but they also persistently directed the American woman to the domestic sphere as her proper rhetorical space. Even though these materials appeared to urge the white middle class women to become effective speakers and writers, convention dictated that a woman’s place was at the hearthside where her rhetorical talents were to be used in counseling and instructing as a mother and wife.
Aided by twenty-one illustrations, Johnson has meticulously compiled materials from historical texts no longer readily available to the general public and, in so doing, has illuminated this intersection of rhetoric and feminism in the nineteenth century. The rhetorical pedagogies designed for a postbellum popular audience represent the cultural sites where a rethinking of women’s roles becomes open controversy about how to value their words. Johnson argues this era of uneasiness about shifting gender roles and the icon of the “quiet woman” must be considered as evidence of the need for a more complete revaluing of women’s space in historical discourse.
Donnalee Rubin examines the responses of thirty-one freshman composition teachers to student writing and shows the negative effects of gender bias on assessment to prove that gender perceptions and expectations can influence assessment decisions that seem neutral on the surface. Arguing that certain pedagogies are more likely to minimize gender bias than others, Rubin believes that teachers are more likely to overcome the influence of gender bias on their teaching if they adopt a process-based method and work intimately with their students through nondirective, supportive conferences.
Rubin characterizes the conference/process-centered class as the type of environment in which maternal teaching can be cultivated. She stresses that maternal can describe any teacher, male or female, who exhibits the nurturing and supportive qualities that the conference/process approach embodies. With a primary focus on the student’s well-being and development as a person and a writer, the maternal teacher is in a better position to overcome gender bias that could distort the interpretation of student texts. In order for writing instructors to increase their sensitivity to gender issues in assessment, Rubin recommends that they self-consciously engage in what she calls "responsive reading." Responsive reading occurs when the teacher reads with an eye toward providing the sorts of supportive feedback and dialectic exchange that will encourage student writers to think for themselves and to revise effectively. Rubin argues that when teachers commit to a responsive-reading pedagogy, they are more likely to question their reactions to student writing along the lines of gender influence and to strive for self-conscious awareness of how their own inner male-female voices may distort their reading of student texts. She challenges all writing teachers to become more aware of the inevitable challenge gender influence presents.
Combining anecdotal evidence (the personal stories of rhetoric and composition teachers) with hard data, Theresa Enos offers documentation for what many have long suspected to be true: lower-division writing courses in colleges and universities are staffed primarily by women who receive minimal pay, little prestige, and lessened job security in comparison to their male counterparts. Male writing faculty, however, also are affected by factors such as low salaries because of the undervaluation of a field considered feminized. As Enos notes in her preface: "The rhetoric of our institutional lives is connected especially to the negotiations of gender roles in rhetoric and composition."
Enos describes and classifies narratives gathered from surveys, interviews, and campus visits and interweaves these narratives with statistical data gathered from national surveys that show gendered experiences in the profession. Enos discusses the ways in which these experiences affect the working conditions of writing teachers and administrators in various programs at different types of institutions.
Enos points out that fields in which women excel—and are acknowledged—receive less prestige than other fields. On the university level, those genres in which women have demonstrated competence are not taken as seriously as those dominated by men. In practical terms, academia affords more glory for teaching literature than for teaching rhetoric and composition.
Within the field of rhetoric and composition, however, Enos finds it difficult to determine why the accomplishments of women receive less credit than those of men. She speculates as to whether it is part of the larger pattern in society—and in academia—to value men more than women or something in the field itself that keeps women from real power, even though women make up the majority of composition and rhetoric teachers.
Enos provides fascinating personal histories of composition and rhetoric teachers whose work has been largely disregarded. She also provides information about writing programs, teaching, administrative responsibilities, ranks among teachers, ages, salary, tenure status, distribution of research, service responsibilities, records of publication, and promotion and tenure guidelines.
In this feminist investigation into the art of preaching—one of the oldest and least studied rhetorical traditions—Roxanne Mountford explores the relationship between bodies, space, race, and gender in rhetorical performance and American Protestant culture. Refiguring delivery and physicality as significant components of the rhetorical situation, The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protestant Spaces examines the strategies of three contemporary women preachers who have transgressed traditions, rearranged rhetorical space, and conquered gender bias to establish greater intimacy with their congregations.
Mountford’s examinations of the rhetoric inherent in preaching manuals from 1850 to the present provide insight into how “manliness” has remained a central concept in American preaching since the mid-nineteenth century. The manuals illustrate that the character, style, method of delivery, and theological purpose of preachers focused on white men and their cultural standing, leaving contemporary women preachers searching for ways to accommodate themselves to the physicality of preaching.
Three case studies of women preachers who have succeeded or failed in rearranging rhetorical space provide the foundation for the volume. These contemporary examples have important implications for feminist theology and also reveal the importance of gender, space, and bodies to studies of rhetoric in general. Mountford explores the geographies of St. John’s Lutheran Church and the preaching of Rev. Patricia O’Connor who reformed rhetorical space through the delivery of her sermons. At Eastside United Church of Christ, Mountford shows, Rev. Barbara Hill employed narrative style and prophetic utterance in the tradition of black preaching to address gender bias and institute change in her congregation. The final case study details the experiences of Pastor Janet Moore and her struggles at Victory Hills United Methodist Church, where the fractured congregation could not be united even with Pastor Moore’s focus on theological purpose and invention strategies.
Institutions of higher education are experiencing the largest influx of enrolled veterans since World War II, and these student veterans are transforming post-secondary classroom dynamics. While many campus divisions like admissions and student services are actively moving to accommodate the rise in this demographic, little research about this population and their educational needs is available, and academic departments have been slower to adjust. In Generation Vet, fifteen chapters offer well-researched, pedagogically savvy recommendations for curricular and programmatic responses to student veterans for English and writing studies departments.
In work with veterans in writing-intensive courses and community contexts, questions of citizenship, disability, activism, community-campus relationships, and retention come to the fore. Moreover, writing-intensive courses can be sites of significant cultural exchanges—even clashes—as veterans bring military values, rhetorical traditions, and communication styles that may challenge the values, beliefs, and assumptions of traditional college students and faculty.
This classroom-oriented text addresses a wide range of issues concerning veterans, pedagogy, rhetoric, and writing program administration. Written by diverse scholar-teachers and written in diverse genres, the essays in this collection promise to enhance our understanding of student veterans, composition pedagogy and administration, and the post-9/11 university.
Genre across the Curriculum will function as a "good" textbook, one not for the student, but for the teacher, and one with an eye on the context of writing. Here you will find models of practice, descriptions written by teachers who have integrated the teaching of genre into their pedagogy in ways that both support and empower the student writer.
While authors here look at courses across disciplines and across a range of genres, they are similar in presenting genre as situated within specific classrooms, disciplines, and institutions. Their assignments embody the pedagogy of a particular teacher, and student responses here embody students' prior experiences with writing. In each chapter, the authors define a particular genre, define the learning goals implicit in assigning that genre, explain how they help their students work through the assignment, and, finally, discuss how they evaluate the writing their students do in response to their teaching.
In recent decades, genre studies has focused attention on how genres mediate social activities within workplace and academic settings. Genre and the Performance of Publics moves beyond institutional settings to explore public contexts that are less hierarchical, broadening the theory of how genres contribute to the interconnected and dynamic performances of public life.
Chapters examine how genres develop within publics and how genres tend to mediate performances in public domains, setting up a discussion between public sphere scholarship and rhetorical genre studies. The volume extends the understanding of genres as not only social ways of organizing texts or mediating relationships within institutions but as dynamic performances themselves.
By exploring how genres shape the formation of publics, Genre and the Performance of Publicsbrings rhetoric/composition and public sphere studies into dialogue and enhances the understanding of public genre performances in ways that contribute to research on and teaching of public discourse.
In his books The Great Plains, The Great Frontier, and The Texas Rangers, historian Walter Prescott Webb created an enduring image of fearless, white, Anglo male settlers and lawmen bringing civilization to an American Southwest plagued with "savage" Indians and Mexicans. So popular was Webb's vision that it influenced generations of historians and artists in all media and effectively silenced the counter-narratives that Mexican American writers and historians were concurrently producing to claim their standing as "gente decente," people of worth.
These counter-narratives form the subject of Leticia M. Garza-Falcón's study. She explores how prominent writers of Mexican descent-such as Jovita González, Américo Paredes, María Cristina Mena, Fermina Guerra, Beatriz de la Garza, and Helena María Viramontes -have used literature to respond to the dominative history of the United States, which offered retrospective justification for expansionist policies in the Southwest and South Texas. Garza-Falcón shows how these counter-narratives capture a body of knowledge and experience excluded from "official" histories, whose "facts" often emerged more from literary techniques than from objective analysis of historical data.
Twenty-first-century technological innovations have revolutionized the way we experience space, causing an increased sense of fragmentation, danger, and placelessness. In Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference, Nedra Reynolds addresses these problems in the context of higher education, arguing that theories of writing and rhetoric must engage the metaphorical implications of place without ignoring materiality.
Geographies of Writing makes three closely related contributions: one theoretical, to reimagine composing as spatial, material, and visual; one political, to understand the sociospatial construction of difference; and one pedagogical, to teach writing as a set of spatial practices. Aided by seven maps and illustrations that reinforce the book’s visual rhetoric, Geographies of Writing shows how composition tasks and electronic space function as conduits for navigating reality.
Although the word gliderman does not appear in the dictionary, a brave group of World War II soldiers known as glidermen flew into combat inside unarmed and unarmored canvas-covered gliders known as "flying coffins."
Charles J. Masters points out that because World War II was the first truly mechanized and armored global conflict, the role of the glidermen and their combat gliders was at best anachronistic. Fighter planes exceeded speeds of 400 miles per hour and were heavily armed with multiple machine guns. Dogfights had taken on new dimensions, eclipsing the tactics, speed, and firepower first evidenced by the fragile biplanes of World War I. Tanks achieved a lethal efficiency barely dreamed of even five years before the war. An array of weaponry never seen in any previous military engagement confronted the combat soldier during World War II.And yet there were gliders. And glidermen.
Masters tells of these men and of their fragile aircraft in a war of mechanized chaos. In copious detail, he describes the gliders and the Americans who boarded them during the American D-Day glider attack, a mission that was part of the overall cross-channel plan code-named "Operation Neptune." The son of a gliderman with the 82nd Airborne Division, Masters had unique access to the surviving glidermen and comrades of his father. During the course of his research, he located and interviewed 106 of the men who had flown the D-Day mission in gliders. As an insider—in a sense almost a member of the family and fraternity of glider-men—Masters was cordially received by the members of the American airborne divisions that participated in D-Day, many of whom told him stories they had seldom told their own friends and families. Often harrowing and always riveting, the stories these men told an eager listener and researcher are very much a part of this narrative.
Masters has also assembled the finest existing collection of photographs of the American D-Day glider attack. These photographs—many of which have never before been published—provide a spectacular photographic record of a little-known aspect of this war. In fact, because of the short military history of the American combat glider, most readers, including veterans of World War II, will not have seen one of these "flying coffins," even at a distance. These photographs afford the opportunity to actually examine the inside of the combat gliders used on D-Day, to observe the glidermen in action, and to witness the often tragic consequences of the glider attack.
Contributors. Gwen Bergner, Maliha Chishti, Cheshmak Farhoumand-Sims, Nigel C. Gibson, Zubeda Jalalzai, David Jefferess, Altaf Ullah Khan, Kamran Rastegar, Rodney J. Steward, Imre Szeman
No modern president has had as much influence on American national politics as Franklin D. Roosevelt. During FDR’s administration, power shifted from states and localities to the federal government; within the federal government it shifted from Congress to the president; and internationally, it moved from Europe to the United States. All of these changes required significant effort on the part of the president, who triumphed over fierce opposition and succeeded in remaking the American political system in ways that continue to shape our politics today. Using the metaphor of the good neighbor, Mary E. Stuckey examines the persuasive work that took place to authorize these changes. Through the metaphor, FDR’s administration can be better understood: his emphasis on communal values; the importance of national mobilization in domestic as well as foreign affairs in defense of those values; his use of what he considered a particularly democratic approach to public communication; his treatment of friends and his delineation of enemies; and finally, the ways in which he used this rhetoric to broaden his neighborhood from the limits of the United States to encompass the entire world, laying the groundwork for American ideological dominance in the post–World War II era.
In Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric, Bruce McComiskey achieves three rhetorical goals: he treats a single sophist's rhetorical technê (art) in the context of the intellectual upheavals of fifth-century bce Greece, thus avoiding the problem of generalizing about a disparate group of individuals; he argues that we must abandon Platonic assumptions regarding the sophists in general and Gorgias in particular, opting instead for a holistic reading of the Gorgianic fragments; and he reexamines the practice of appropriating sophistic doctrines, particularly those of Gorgias, in light of the new interpretation of Gorgianic rhetoric offered in this book.
In the first two chapters, McComiskey deals with a misconception based on selective and Platonic readings of the extant fragments: that Gorgias's rhetorical technê involves the deceptive practice of manipulating public opinion. This popular and ultimately misleading interpretation of Gorgianic doctrines has been the basis for many neosophistic appropriations. The final three chapters deal with the nature and scope of neosophistic rhetoric in light of the non-Platonic and holistic interpretation of Gorgianic rhetoric McComiskey postulates in his opening chapters. He concludes by examining the future of communication studies to discover what roles neosophistic doctrines might play in the twenty-first century.
McComiskey also provides a selective bibliography of scholarship on sophistic rhetoric and philosophy in English since 1900.
The Grammar Crammer is a concise, sensible grammar handbook that explains lucidly how to remember correct word forms and sentence structures. Useful as a reference tool for high school and beyond, it packs an entire grammar encyclopedia into just over a hundred pages.
What is the nature of grassroots activism? How and why do individuals get involved or attempt to make change for themselves, others, or their own communities? What motivates activists to maintain momentum when their efforts to redress injustices or paths toward change seem difficult or personally risky to navigate? These questions and more are addressed in Grassroots Activisms: Public Rhetorics in Localized Contexts. Featuring a diverse array of both local activist profiles and original scholarly essays, the collection amplifies and analyzes the tactics of grassroots activists working locally to intervene in a variety of social injustices—from copwatching and policy reform to Indigenous resistance against land colonization to #RageAgainstRape.
Attuned to the demanding—and often underappreciated—work of grassroots activism, this book interrogates how such efforts unfold within and against existing historical, cultural, social, and political realities of local communities; are informed by the potentials and constraints of coalition-building; and ultimately shape different facets of society at the local level. This collection acknowledges and celebrates the complexity of grassroots activist work, showing how these less-recognized efforts often effect change where institutions have failed.
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