Becoming a Social Science Researcher is designed to help aspiring social scientists, including credentialed scholars, understand the formidable complexities of the research process. Instead of explaining specific research techniques, it concentrates on the philosophical, sociological, and psychological dimensions of social research. These dimensions have received little coverage in guides written for social science researchers, but they are arguably even more important than particular analytical techniques. Truly sophisticated social science scholarship requires that researchers understand the intellectual and social contexts in which they collect and interpret information. While social science training in US graduate schools has become more systematic over the past two decades, graduate training and published guidance still fall short in addressing this fundamental need.

A 1960s American folk music legend weaves stories of a girlhood on “the singing streets” of Ireland, marriage in Scotland, and arrival in America

The teacher-student conference is standard in the repertoire of teachers at all levels. Because it's a one-to-one encounter, teachers work hard to make it comfortable; but because it's a pedagogical moment, they hope that learning occurs in the encounter, too. The literature in this area often suggests that a conference is a conversation, but this doesn't account for a teacher's need to use it pedagogically. Laurel Johnson Black's new book explores the conflicting meanings and relations embedded in conferencing and offers a new theoretical understanding of the conference along with practical approaches to conferencing more effectively with students.

Analyzing taped conferences of several different teachers and students, Black considers the influence that power, gender, and culture can have on a conference. She draws on sociolinguistic theory, as well as critical theory in composition and rhetoric, to build an understanding of the writing conference as an encounter somewhere between conversation and the classroom. She finds neither the conversation model nor versions of the master-apprentice model satisfactory. Her approach is humane, student-centered, and progressive, but it does not ignore the valid pedagogical purposes a teacher might have in conferencing. Between Talk and Teaching will be a valuable addition to the professional library of writing teachers and writing program administrators.

Beyond Postprocess offers a vigorous, provocative discussion of postprocess theory in its contemporary profile. Fueled by something like a fundamental refusal to see writing as self-evident, reducible, and easily explicable, the contributors rethink postprocess, suggesting that there is no easily defined moment or method that could be called postprocess. Instead, each contribution to this collection provides a unique and important example of what work beyond postprocess could be.

Since postprocess theory in writing studies first challenged traditional conceptions of writing and the subject who writes, developments there have continued to push theorists of writing in a number of promising theoretical directions. Spaces for writing have arisen that radically alter ideological notions of space, rational thinking, intellectual property and politics, and epistemologies; and new media, digital, and visual rhetorics have increasingly complicated the scene, as well.

Contributors to Beyond Postprocess reconsider writing and writing studies through posthumanism, ecology, new media, materiality, multimodal and digital writing, institutional critique, and postpedagogy. Through the lively and provocative character of these essays, Beyond Postprocess aims to provide a critical site for nothing less than the broad reevaluation of what it means to study writing today. Its polyvocal considerations and conclusions invest the volume with a unique potential to describe not what that field of study should be, but what it has the capacity to create. The central purpose of Beyond Postprocess is to unleash this creative potential.

Blank verse—unrhymed iambic pentameter—is familiar to many as the form of Shakespeare’s plays and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Since its first use in English in the sixteenth century, it has provided poets with a powerful and versatile metrical line, enabling the creation of some of the most memorable poems of Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Frost, Stevens, Wilbur, Nemerov, Hecht, and a host of others. A protean meter, blank verse lends itself to lyric, dramatic, narrative, and meditative modes; to epigram as well as to epic. Blank Verse is the first book since 1895 to offer a detailed study of the meter’s technical features and its history, as well as its many uses. Robert B. Shaw gives ample space and emphasis to the achievements of modern and postmodern poets working in the form, an area neglected until now by scholarship.

With its compact but inclusive survey of more than four centuries of poetry, Blank Verse is filled with practical advice for poets of our own day who may wish to attempt the form or enhance their mastery of it. Enriched with numerous examples, Shaw’s discussions of verse technique are lively and accessible, inviting not only to apprentice poets but to all readers of poetry.

Shaw’s approach should reassure those who find prosody intimidating, while encouraging specialists to think more broadly about how traditional poetic forms can be taught, learned, practiced, and appreciated in the twenty-first century. Besides filling a conspicuous gap in literary history, Blank Verse points the way ahead for poets interested in exploring blank verse and its multitude of uses.

Healthy, invalid, lustful, and confined bodies—as portrayed by Julio Cortázar, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Gabriel García Márquez, Severo Sarduy, Rosario Castellanos, and Tununa Mercado—become evidence for Roland Barthes’s contention that works of fiction are “anagrams of the body.” Claiming that an author’s intentions can be uncovered by analyzing “the topography of a text,” Prieto pays particular attention not to the actions or plots of these writers’ fiction but rather to their settings and characterizations. In the belief that bodily traces left on the page reveal the motivating force behind a writer’s creative act, he explores such fictional themes as camouflage, deterioration, defilement, entrapment, and subordination. Along the way, Prieto reaches unexpected conclusions regarding topics that include the relationship of the female body to power, male and female transgressive impulses, and the connection between aggression, the idealization of women, and anal eroticism in men.

This study of how authors’ longings and fears become embodied in literature will interest students and scholars of literary and psychoanalytic criticism, gender studies, and twentieth-century and Latin American literature.

A Braided Heart provides a friendly, personal, and smart guide to the writing life. It also offers clear and original instruction on craft elements at the forefront of today’s emerging forms in creative nonfiction: from the short-short, to the braided form, to the hermit crab essay. An acknowledged expert in these forms, Brenda Miller gives writers practical advice on how to sustain and invigorate their writing practice, while also encouraging readers to explore their own writing lives.

“Brenda Miller writes so beautifully in these lyrical and ‘braided’ essays—personal meditations that take us deep into the miracle of writing itself. Her eye is always alert, her ear wonderfully tuned to the nuances of perception. The art of the essay is alive and well in her hands.”
 —Jay Parini, author of Borges and Me

No less than other divisions of the college or university, contemporary writing centers find themselves within a galaxy of competing questions and demands that relate to assessment—questions and demands that usually embed priorities from outside the purview of the writing center itself. Writing centers are used to certain kinds of assessment, both quantitative and qualitative, but are often unprepared to address larger institutional or societal issues. In Building Writing Center Assessments that Matter, Schendel and Macauley start from the kinds of assessment strengths already in place in writing centers, and they build a framework that can help writing centers satisfy local needs and put them in useful dialogue with the larger needs of their institutions, while staying rooted in writing assessment theory.

The authors begin from the position that tutoring writers is already an assessment activity, and that good assessment practice (rooted in the work of Adler-Kassner, O'Neill, Moore, and Huot) already reflects the values of writing center theory and practice. They offer examples of assessments developed in local contexts, and of how assessment data built within those contexts can powerfully inform decisions and shape the futures of local writing centers. With additional contributions by Neal Lerner, Brian Huot and Nicole Caswell, and with a strong commitment to honoring on-site local needs, the volume does not advocate a one-size-fits-all answer. But, like the modeling often used in a writing consultation, examples here illustrate how important assessment principles have been applied in a range of local contexts. Ultimately, Building Writing Assessments that Matter describes a theory stance toward assessment for writing centers that honors the uniqueness of the writing center context, and examples of assessment in action that are concrete, manageable, portable, and adaptable.

David Rush takes beginning playwrights through the first draft of a play and deep into the revision process. Drawing on examples from such classics as Othello and The Glass Menagerie, Rush provides detailed models for writers to evaluate their work for weaknesses and focus on the in-depth development of their plays. 

Rush encourages writers to make sure their plays are clear and focused. He shows how to keep plays dramatically compelling and offers ways to avoid common mistakes that make them dull, confusing, or ineffective. He then distills the essence of traditional revision into key questions and discusses frequently overlooked tools, terms, and strategies that go beyond established methods of evaluation.