A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY51 start with P start with P
Painting the Maya Universe is the first publication to present a definitive translation of the hieroglyphic texts painted on these objects. With many glyphs deciphered here for the first time, this analysis reveals much about how these vessels were perceived and used by the Maya, their owners’ names, and, in several cases, the names of the artists who created them. This information is combined with archaeological and other data, including nuclear chemical analyses, to correlate painting styles with specific Maya sites.
Published in conjunction with Duke University Museum of Art and an exhibition touring the United States, Painting the Maya Universe presents an astonishing visual record as well as a monumental scholarly achievement. With photographs by Justin Kerr, the foremost photographer of pre-Columbian art, it includes over 90 unique full-color rollout photographs, each showing the entire surface of an object in a single frame. The book also addresses the questions and controversy regarding the loss of information that occurs when objects are removed from their archaeological context to become part of public and private collections.
Painting the Maya Universe will energize discussion of Maya pottery, hieroglyphic texts, and iconography. Its photographs, a lasting resource on this great painting tradition, will stimulate and delight the eye. It is a breakthrough in art history and Latin American scholarship that will enrich general readers and scholars alike.
Together, Borgman and McArdle are creators of The Online Writing Instruction Community, a website and social media group dedicated to collecting and sharing online writing instruction resources. They coauthored a book which was released in the fall of 2019 titled Personal, Accessible, Responsive, Strategic: Resources and Strategies for Online Writing Instructors, which is based on their PARS approach to online writing instruction. They host professional development workshops on online writing instruction and the PARS approach.
Like. Share. Comment. Subscribe. Embed. Upload. Check in. The commands of the modern online world relentlessly prompt participation and encourage collaboration, connecting people in ways not possible even five years ago. This connectedness no doubt influences college writing courses in both form and content, creating possibilities for investigating new forms of writing and student participation. In this innovative volume, Sarah J. Arroyo argues for a “participatory composition,” inspired by the culture of online video sharing and framed by theorist Gregory Ulmer’s concept of electracy.
Electracy, according to Ulmer, “is to digital media what literacy is to alphabetic writing.” Although electracy can be compared to digital literacy, it is not something shut on and off with the power buttons on computers or mobile devices. Rather, electracy encompasses the cultural, institutional, pedagogical, and ideological implications inherent in the transition from a culture of print literacy to a culture saturated with electronic media, regardless of the presence of actual machines.
Arroyo explores the apparatus of electracy in many of its manifestations while focusing on the participatory practices found in online video culture, particularly on YouTube. Chapters are devoted to questions of subjectivity, definition, authorship, and pedagogy. Utilizing theory and incorporating practical examples from YouTube, classrooms, and other social sites, Arroyo presents accessible and practical approaches for writing instruction. Additionally, she outlines the concept of participatory composition by highlighting how it manifests in online video culture, offers student examples of engagement with the concept, and advocates participatory approaches throughout the book.
Arroyo presents accessible and practical possibilities for teaching and learning that will benefit scholars of rhetoric and composition, media studies, and anyone interested in the cultural and instructional implications of the digital age.
Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe created a volume that set the agenda in the field of computers and composition scholarship for a decade. The technology changes that scholars of composition studies faced as the new century opened couldn't have been more deserving of passionate study. While we have always used technologies (e.g., the pencil) to communicate with each other, the electronic technologies we now use have changed the world in ways that we have yet to identify or appreciate fully. Likewise, the study of language and literate exchange, even our understanding of terms like literacy, text, and visual, has changed beyond recognition, challenging even our capacity to articulate them.
As Hawisher, Selfe, and their contributors engage these challenges and explore their importance, they "find themselves engaged in the messy, contradictory, and fascinating work of understanding how to live in a new world and a new century." The result is a broad, deep, and rewarding anthology of work still among the standard works of computers and composition study.
In a book that itself exemplifies the dialogic scholarship it proposes, Kay Halasek reconceives composition studies from a Bakhtinian perspective, focusing on both the discipline's theoretical assumptions and its pedagogies.
Framing her discussions at every level of the discipline—theoretical, historical, pedagogical—Halasek provides an overview of portions of the Bakhtinian canon relevant to composition studies, explores the implications of Mikhail Bakhtin's work in the teaching of writing and for current debates about the role of theory in composition studies, and provides a model of scholarship that strives to maintain dialogic balance between practice and theory, between composition studies and Bakhtinian thought.
Halasek's study ranges broadly across the field of composition, painting in wide strokes a new picture of the discipline, focusing on the finer details of the rhetorical situation, and teasing out the implications of Bakhtinian thought for classroom practice by examining the nature of critical reading and writing, the efficacy and ethics of academic discourse, student resistance, and critical and conflict pedagogy. The book ends by setting out a pedagogy of possibility, what Halasek terms elsewhere a "post-critical pedagogy" that redefines and redirects current discussions of home versus academic literacies and discourses.
Now that classes are as likely to be online as held in physical classrooms and now that a new generation of digital natives can routinely read and respond to what others write via laptops, tablets, and phones, peer response as pedagogical practice is not just more easily implemented, but it is more likely to feel natural to L2 learners.
The Second Edition is a highly accessible guide to how the world is using peer response and serves as a motivator and facilitator for those who want to try it for the first time or want to increase the effectiveness of the activities—whether via CMC or not. The volume includes 11 forms useful in training students to provide good peer feedback, including a final checklist to ensure teachers have taken all the necessary steps to achieve a successful peer feedback activity.
In Performing Antiracist Pedagogy, Frankie Condon and Vershawn Ashanti Young seek to help create openings to address race and racism not only in course readings and class discussion in writing, rhetoric, and communication courses but also in wider public settings. The contributors to this collection, drawn from a wide range of disciplines, urge readers to renew their commitment to intelligently and publicly deliberate race and to counteract the effects of racism. The book is both theoretically rigorous and practical, providing readers with insightful analyses of race and racism and useful classroom suggestions and examples.
Contributors: Chiara Bacigalupa, Sophia Bell, Susan Leigh Brooks, Frankie Condon, Rasha Diab, John Dean, Thomas Ferrell, Beth Godbee, Dae-Joong Kim, Timothy Lensmire, Calvin M. Logue, Aja Y. Martinez, Rebecca Nathan, Bobbi Olson, Jessica Parker, Charise Pimentel, Octavio Pimentel, Mya Poe, Neil Simpkins, Nathan Snaza, Deatra Sullivan, Vershawn Ashanti Young
In Performing Loss: Rebuilding Community through Theater and Writing, author Jodi Kanter explores opportunities for creativity and growth within our collective responses to grief. Performing Loss provides teachers, students, and others interested in performance with strategies for reading, writing, and performing loss as communities—in the classroom, the theater, and the wider public sphere.
From an adaptation of Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness to a reading of Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play, from Kanter’s own experience creating theater with terminally ill patients and federal prisoners to a visual artist’s response to September 11th, Kanter shows in practical, replicable detail how performing loss with community members can transform experiences of isolation and paralysis into experiences of solidarity and action.
Drawing on academic work in performance, cultural studies, literature, sociology, and anthropology, Kanter considers a range of responses to grief in historical context and goes on to imagine newer, more collaborative, and more civically engaged responses. Performing Loss describes Kanter’s pedagogical and artistic processes in lively and vivid detail, enabling the reader to use her projects as models or to adapt the techniques to new communities, venues, and purposes. Kanter demonstrates through each example the ways in which writing and performing can create new possibilities for mourning and living together.
In Performing Prose, authors Chris Holcomb and M. Jimmie Killingsworth breathe new life into traditional concepts of style. Drawing on numerous examples from a wide range of authors and genres, Holcomb and Killingsworth demonstrate the use of style as a vehicle for performance, a way for writers to project themselves onto the page while managing their engagement with the reader. By addressing style and rhetoric not as an editorial afterthought, but as a means of social interaction, they equip students with the vocabulary and tools to analyze the styles of others in fresh ways, as well as create their own.
Whereas most writing texts focus exclusively on analysis or techniques to improve writing, Holcomb and Killingsworth blend these two schools of thought to provide a singular process of thinking about writing. They discuss not only the benefits of conventional methods, but also the use of deviation from tradition; the strategies authors use to vary their style; and the use of such vehicles as images, tropes, and schemes. The goal of the authors is to provide writers with stylistic “footing”: an understanding of the ways writers use style to orchestrate their relationships with readers, subject matter, and rhetorical situations.
Packed with useful tips and insights, this comprehensive volume investigates every aspect of style and its use to present an indispensable resource for both students and scholars. Performing Prose moves beyond customary studies to provide a refreshing and informative approach to the concepts and strategies of writing.
McKinney argues that this grand narrative neglects the extent to which writing center work is theoretically and pedagogically complex, with ever-changing work and conditions, and results in a straitjacket for writing center scholars, practitioners, students, and outsiders alike. Peripheral Visions for Writing Centers makes the case for a broader narrative of writing center work that recognizes and theorizes the various spaces of writing center labor, allows for professionalization of administrators, and sees tutoring as just one way to perform writing center work.
McKinney explores possibilities that lie outside the grand narrative, allowing scholars and practitioners to open the field to a fuller, richer, and more realistic representation of their material labor and intellectual work.
With this volume, then, these scholars move us to explore the intersections of the social with subjectivity, with voice, ideology, and culture, and to consider the roles of these in the work of academics who study writing and literature. Taken together, the essays in this collection carry forward the idea that the personal, the candidly subjective and intersubjective, must be part of the subject of study in humanities scholarship. They propose an understanding of the personal in scholarship that is more helpful because more clearly anchored in human experience.
Responding to contemporary discussion about using personal accounts in academic writing, Personally Speaking: Experience as Evidence in Academic Discourse draws on classical and current rhetorical theory, feminist theory, and relevant examples from both published writers and first-year writing students to illustrate the advantages of blending experiential and academic perspectives.
Candace Spigelman examines how merging personal and scholarly worldviews produces useful contradictions and contributes to a more a complex understanding in academic writing. This rhetorical move allows for greater insights than the reading or writing of experiential or academic modes separately does. Personally Speaking foregrounds the semi-fictitious nature of personal stories and the rhetorical possibilities of evidence as Spigelman provides strategies for writing instructors who want to teach personal academic argument while supplying practical mechanisms for evaluating experiential claims.
The volume seeks to complicate and intensify disciplinary debates about how compositionists should write for publication and what kinds of writing should be taught to composition students. Spigelman not only supplies evidence as to why the personal can count as evidence but also relates how to use it effectively by including student samples that reflect particular features of personal writing. Finally, she lays the groundwork to move narrative from its current site as confessional writing to the domain of academic discourse.
Susan Wells and Reed Way Dasenbrock provide distinctly divergent assessments of the application of Donald Davidson’ s language theory to rhetoric and composition, and especially to writing pedagogy. Patricia Bizzell and John Trimbur explore how Stanley Fish’ s neopragmatism might be useful both to composition theory and to literacy education. And Joyce Irene Middleton and Tom Fox discuss bell hooks’ s notions of how race and gender affect pedagogy. In two frank and sometimes angry responses, Patricia Harkin and Jasper Neel take J. Hillis Miller to task for seeming to support rhetoric and composition while continuing to maintain the political status quo. Similarly, Susan C. Jarratt and Elizabeth A. Flynn express skepticism about Jane Tompkins’ s vocal support of composition and of radical pedagogy particularly. And Arabella Lyon and C. Jan Swearingen analyze Stephen Toulmin’ s thoughts on argumentation and postmodernism.
Internationally respected anthropologist Clifford Geertz provides a foreword; literacy expert Patricia Bizzell contributes an introduction to the text; and noted reader-response critic David Bleich supplies critical commentary.
This book is a follow-up to the editor’ s (Inter)views: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Rhetoric and Literacy, already a major work of scholarship in the field.
Philosophy’s relation to the act of writing is John T. Lysaker’s main concern in Philosophy, Writing, and the Character of Thought. Whether in Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, or Derrida, philosophy has come in many forms, and those forms—the concrete shape philosophizing takes in writing—matter. Much more than mere adornment, the style in which a given philosopher writes is often of crucial importance to the point he or she is making, part and parcel of the philosophy itself.
Considering how writing influences philosophy, Lysaker explores genres like aphorism, dialogue, and essay, as well as logical-rhetorical operations like the example, irony, and quotation. At the same time, he shows us the effects of these rhetorical devices through his own literary experimentation. In dialogue with such authors as Benjamin, Cavell, Emerson, and Lukács, he aims to revitalize philosophical writing, arguing that philosophy cannot fulfill its intellectual and cultural promise if it keeps to professional articles and academic prose. Instead, philosophy must embrace writing as an essential, creative activity, and deliberately reform how it approaches its subject matter, readership, and the evolving social practices of reading and reflection.
Because undergraduate degrees in writing studies are relatively new, claiming the discipline has required reinvention and revision at personal and professional levels far different than any other discipline. Suspicions about the viability of the discipline linger in many departments and universities, as well as outside the academy, leading writing studies scholars to develop innovative strategies to deal with covertly hostile attitudes. Within the collection, contributors name explicit claiming strategies from the discipline’s beginnings to the contemporary moment, locating opportune spaces, negotiating identities and fostering resilience, and developing allegiances by foregrounding their embodiment as underrepresented members of academia through a commitment to social justice and equity.
Responding to current conversations on the worth of education with honest stories about the burdens and joys of becoming and being an academic, Pivotal Strategies features a spectrum of voices across racial, gender, class, and age categories. This collection not only makes the discipline more visible but also helps map the contemporary state of writing studies.
Using the results of interviews with seasonal Canadian tree planters, Jennifer Clary-Lemon interrogates the complex and messy imbrication of nature-culture through the inadequate terminology used to describe the actual circumstances of the planters’ work and lives—and offers alternative ways to conceptualize them. Although silvicultural workers do engage with the limiting rhetoric of efficiency and humanism, they also make rhetorical choices that break down the nature-culture divide and orient them on a continuum that blurs the boundaries between the given and the constructed, the human and nonhuman. Tree-planting work is approached as a site of a deep-seated materiality—a continued re-creation of the land’s “disturbance”—rather than a simplistic form of doing good that further separates humans from landscapes.
Jennifer Clary-Lemon’s view of nature and the Anthropocene through the lens of material rhetorical studies is thoroughly original and will be of great interest to students and scholars of rhetoric and composition, especially those focused on the environment.
Winner, Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize
Achieving the remarkable feat of linking composition theory, deconstruction, and classical rhetoric, this book has been admirably summarized by the theorist G. Douglas Atkins, who writes: "This lively and engaging, informed and informative book constitutes an important contribution. Though its ‘field’ is most obviously composition, composition theory, and pedagogy, part of its importance derives from the way it transcends disciplinary boundaries to bear on writing in general. . . I know of no book that so fully and well discusses, and evaluates, the implications of deconstruction for composition and pedagogy. That [it] goes ‘beyond deconstruction,’ rather than merely ‘applying’ it, increases its importance and signals a clear contribution to the understanding of writing."
Jasper Neel analyzes the emerging field of composition studies within the epistemological and ontological debate over writing precipitated by Plato, who would have us abandon writing entirely, and continued by Derrida, who argues that all human beings are written. This book offers a three-part exploration of that debate. In the first part, a deconstructive reading of Plato’s Phaedrus, Neel shows the elaborate sleight-of-hand that Plato must employ as he uses writing to engage in a semblance of spoken dialogue.
The second part describes Derrida’s theory of writing and presents his famous argument that "the history of truth, of the truth of truth, has always been. . .the debasement of writing, and its repression outside full speech." A lexicon of nine Derridean terms, the key to his theory of writing, is also included. At the end of this section, Neel turns deconstruction against itself, demonstrating that Derridean analysis collapses of its own weight.
The concluding section of the book juxtaposes the implications of Platonic and Derridean views of writing, warning that Derrida’s approach may lock writing inside philosophy. The conclusion suggests that writing may be liberated from philosophical judgment by turning to Derrida’s predecessors, the sophists, particularly Protagoras and Gorgias. Drawing on Protagoras’s idea of strong discourse, Neel shows that sophistry is the foundation of democracy: "Strong discourse is public discourse, which, though based on probability and not truth, remains persuasive over a long period of time to a great number of people. This publicly tested discourse exists only among competitors, never alone, but its ability to remain persuasive even when surrounded by other discourses enables the ideas of democracy to emerge and then keeps democracy alive."
Drawing on Shakespeare, anthropomorphic typography, figured letters, and Cyrillic pedagogy and politics, this book explores the ways in which alphabetic thinking and writing inform literature and the visual arts, and it develops reading strategies for the “letterature” that underwrites such cultural production. Playful Letters begins with early modern engagements with the alphabet and the human body—an intersection where letterature emerges with startling force. The linking of letters and typography with bodies produced a new kind of literacy. In turn, educational habits that shaped letter learning and writing permeated the interrelated practices of typography, orthography, and poetry. These mutually informing processes render visible the persistent crumbling of words into letters and their reconstitution into narrative, poetry, and image.
In addition to providing a rich history of literary and artistic alphabetic interrogation in early modern Western Europe and Russia, Playful Letters contributes to the continuous story of how people use new technologies and media to reflect on older forms, including the alphabet itself.
Classic criticism.
This volume brings together the three most influential ancient Greek treatises on literature.
Aristotle’s Poetics contains his treatment of Greek tragedy: its history, nature, and conventions, with details on poetic diction. Stephen Halliwell makes this seminal work newly accessible with a reliable text and a translation that is both accurate and readable. His authoritative introduction traces the work’s debt to earlier theorists (especially Plato), its distinctive argument, and the reasons behind its enduring relevance.
The essay On the Sublime, usually attributed to “Longinus” (identity uncertain), was probably composed in the first century AD; its subject is the appreciation of greatness (“the sublime”) in writing, with analysis of illustrative passages ranging from Homer and Sappho to Plato and Genesis. In this edition, Donald A. Russell has judiciously revised and newly annotated the text and translation by W. Hamilton Fyfe and provides a new introduction.
The treatise On Style, ascribed to an (again unidentifiable) Demetrius, was perhaps composed during the secod century BC. It is notable particularly for its theory and analysis of four distinct styles (grand, elegant, plain, and forceful). Doreen Innes’ fresh rendering of the work is based on the earlier Loeb translation by W. Rhys Roberts. Her new introduction and notes represent the latest scholarship.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.
The three parts of A Poet’s Guide to Poetry lead the reader through a carefully planned introduction to the ways we understand poetry. The first section provides careful, step-by-step instruction to familiarize students with the formal elements of poems, from the most obvious feature through the most subtle. The second part carefully examines meter and rhythm, as well as providing a theoretical and practical overview of free verse. The final section offers helpful chapters on writing in form. Rounding out the volume are writing exercises for beginning and advanced writers, a dictionary of poetic terms, and a bibliography of further reading.
For this new edition, Kinzie has carefully reworked the introductory material and first chapter, as well as amended the annotated bibliography to include the most recent works of criticism. The updated guide also contains revised exercises and adjustments throughout the text to make the work as lucid and accessible as possible.
The office of the poet laureate of Britain was a highly prominent, relevant, and respectable institution throughout the long eighteenth century. First instituted for John Dryden in 1668, the laureateship developed from an honorific into a functionary office with a settled position in court, and in 1813 was bestowed upon Robert Southey, whose tenure transformed the office. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book examines the office’s institutional changes and public reception, the mechanics of each laureate’s appointment, and the works produced by the laureates before and after their appointments. It argues that the laureateship played a key part in some of the most vital trends in eighteenth-century culture.
At the core of the book is a new research paradigm that Leo Shipp calls the conceptual geography of culture. It shows that Britons routinely used spatial concepts to understand culture throughout the period, which became increasingly abstract over time. As part of this, Shipp shows, the court evolved from a concrete space in London to an abstract space capable of hosting the entire British public. The laureateship was a dynamic office positioned at the interface of court and public, evolving in line with its audiences. An important intervention in eighteenth-century historiography, this book presents a nuanced understanding of eighteenth-century culture and society, in which the laureateship exemplified the enduring centrality of the court to the British conceptual geography of culture.
The contributors offer methodologies, techniques, and suggestions for research that move beyond decontextualized guides to grapple with the messiness of research-in-process, as well as design, development, and expansion. Serviss and Jamieson’s model of RAD writing studies research is transcontextual and based on hybridized or mixed methods. Among these methods are citation context analysis, research-aloud protocols, textual and genre analysis, surveys, interviews, and focus groups, with an emphasis on process and knowledge as contingent. Chapters report on research projects at different stages and across institution types—from pilot to multi-site, from community college to research university—focusing on the methods and artifacts employed.
A rich mosaic of research about research, Points of Departure advances knowledge about student writing and serves as a guide for both new and experienced researchers in writing studies.
Contributors: Crystal Benedicks, Katt Blackwell-Starnes, Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch, Kristi Murray Costello, Anne Diekema, Rebecca Moore Howard, Sandra Jamieson, Elizabeth Kleinfeld, Brian N. Larson, Karen J. Lunsford, M. Whitney Olsen, Tricia Serviss, Janice R. Walker
Author Tyler S. Branson argues that education reform initiatives in the twentieth century can be understood in terms of historical shifts in the ideas, interests, and governing arrangements that inform the teaching of writing. Today, policy regimes of “accountability” shape education reform programs such as Common Core in K-12 and Dual Enrollment in postsecondary institutions. This book reopens the conversation between policy makers and writing teachers, empirically describing the field’s institutional/historical relationship to policy and the ways teachers work on a daily basis to carry out policy. Federal and state accountability policy significantly shapes classrooms before teachers even enter them, but Branson argues the classroom is where teachers leverage disciplinary knowledge about writing to bridge, partner with, support, and sometimes resist education policies.
Branson deftly blends policy critique, archival analysis, and participant observation to offer the first scholarly treatment of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Washington Task Force as well as a rare empirical study of a dual enrollment course offered in a high school. This book’s macro-and-micro-level analysis of education policy reveals how writing teachers, researchers, and administrators can strengthen their commitments to successfully teaching their students across all levels of education, while deepening their understanding of the ways education policy helps—and hinders—those commitments.
While some students need more writing instruction than others, The Politics of Remediation reveals how that need also pertains to the institutions themselves. Mary Soliday argues that universities may need remedial English to alleviate their own crises in admissions standards, enrollment, mission, and curriculum, and English departments may use remedial programs to mediate their crises in enrollment, electives, and relationships to the liberal arts and professional schools.
Following a brief history of remedial English and the political uses of remediation at CCNY before, during, and after the open admissions policy, Soliday questions the ways in which students’ need for remedial writing instruction has become widely associated with the need to acculturate minorities to the university. In disentangling identity politics from remediation, she challenges a powerful assumption of post-structuralist work: that a politics of language use is equivalent to the politics of access to institutions.
During the period of Aztec expansion and empire (ca. 1325–1525), scribes of high social standing used a pictographic writing system to paint hundreds of manuscripts detailing myriad aspects of life, including historical, calendric, and religious information. Following the Spanish conquest, native and mestizo tlacuiloque (artist-scribes) of the sixteenth century continued to use pre-Hispanic pictorial writing systems to record information about native culture. Three of these manuscripts—Codex Boturini, Codex Azcatitlan, and Codex Aubin—document the origin and migration of the Mexica people, one of several indigenous groups often collectively referred to as “Aztec.”
In Portraying the Aztec Past, Angela Herren Rajagopalan offers a thorough study of these closely linked manuscripts, articulating their narrative and formal connections and examining differences in format, style, and communicative strategies. Through analyses that focus on the materials, stylistic traits, facture, and narrative qualities of the codices, she places these annals in their historical and social contexts. Her work adds to our understanding of the production and function of these manuscripts and explores how Mexica identity is presented and framed after the conquest.
Dobrin evaluates the current state of composition studies, underscoring the difference between composition and writing and arguing that the field's focus on the administration of writing students and its historically imposed prohibition on theory greatly limit what can be understood about writing. Instead he envisions a more significant approach to writing, one that questions the field's conservative allegiance to subject and administration and reconsiders writing as spatial and ecological. Using concepts from ecocomposition, spatial theory, network theory, complexity theory, and systems theory, Postcomposition lays the groundwork for a networked theory of writing, and advocates the abandonment of administration as a useful part of the field. He also challenges the usefulness of rhetoric in writing studies, showing how writing exceeds rhetoric.
Postcomposition is a detailed consideration of how posthumanism affects the field's understanding of subjectivity. It also tears at the seams of the "contingent labor problem." As he articulates his own frustrations with the conservatism of composition studies and builds on previous critiques of the discipline, Dobrin stages a courageous-and inevitably polemical-intellectual challenge to the entrenched ideas and assumptions that have defined composition studies.
In Postprocess Postmortem, Kristopher M. Lotier surveys the postprocess era-that-never-was, its end, and its after-lives. Employing cutting-edge digital research tools to track the circulation of texts and shifting scales from the global to the local and back again, he offers a revisionist history of a largely unchronicled past. From one perspective, the history of postprocess might seem to be a history of failure: what could have become The Next Big Thing in composition and writing studies during the 1990s and early 2000s never quite ascended. Today, few writing studies scholars apply the term postprocess to their own research or self-identify with a postprocess movement. And yet, as Lotier demonstrates, numerous core postprocess tenets have attained disciplinary centrality. The result: whether they admit to doing so or not, many contemporary scholars employ a postprocess vocabulary, allowing the ideas underlying this important movement/theory/period/attitude to live on.
Breaking with the still-dominant process tradition in composition studies, post-process theory—or at least the different incarnations of post-process theory discussed by the contributors represented in this collection of original essays—endorses the fundamental idea that no codifiable or generalizable writing process exists or could exist. Post-process theorists hold that the practice of writing cannot be captured by a generalized process or a "big" theory.
Most post-process theorists hold three assumptions about the act of writing: writing is public; writing is interpretive; and writing is situated. The first assumption is the commonsensical claim that writing constitutes a public interchange. By "interpretive act," post-process theorists generally mean something as broad as "making sense of" and not exclusively the ability to move from one code to another. To interpret means more than merely to paraphrase; it means to enter into a relationship of understanding with other language users. And finally, because writing is a public act that requires interpretive interaction with others, writers always write from some position or some place. Writers are never nowhere; they are "situated."
Leading theorists and widely published scholars in the field, contributors are Nancy Blyler, John Clifford, Barbara Couture, Nancy C. DeJoy, Sidney I. Dobrin, Elizabeth Ervin, Helen Ewald, David Foster, Debra Journet, Thomas Kent, Gary A. Olson, Joseph Petraglia, George Pullman, David Russell, and John Schilb.
A city of immense literary mystique, Prague has inspired writers across the centuries with its beauty, cosmopolitanism, and tragic history. Envisioning the ancient city in central Europe as a multilayered text, or palimpsest, that has been constantly revised and rewritten—from the medieval and Renaissance chroniclers who legitimized the city’s foundational origins to the modernists of the early twentieth century who established its reputation as the new capital of the avant-garde—Alfred Thomas argues that Prague has become a paradoxical site of inscription and effacement, of memory and forgetting, a utopian link to the prewar and pre-Holocaust European past and a dystopia of totalitarian amnesia.
Considering a wide range of writers, including the city’s most famous son, Franz Kafka, Prague Palimpsest reassesses the work of poets and novelists such as Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Gustav Meyrink, Jan Neruda, Vítĕzslav Nezval, and Rainer Maria Rilke and engages with other famous authors who “wrote” Prague, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Ingeborg Bachmann, Albert Camus, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald. The result is a comparative, interdisciplinary study that helps to explain why Prague—more than any other major European city—has haunted the cultural and political imagination of the West.
The Predator Effect concerns predatory publishing — it is the first to chart both the rise and impact of deceptive publishing. The author — a scientific communications expert with 20 years’ experience — looks at how predatory journals had become an accepted part of scholarly publishing, reviewing in turn the history, development and impact of predatory journals. The book also puts their rise in context of wider issues such as Open Access and publication ethics. Other issues it addresses include: defining predatory journals, the history of predatory publishing practices, Beall’s List, authors’ motivations and the future of predatory publishing practices.
The volume is organized into four parts: Setting the Stage for Teaching Writing, Supporting the Writing Process, Working with Beginning Writers, and Aligning Writing with Accountability Systems. Chapters are written by current (or former) adult educators with experience across levels. Each chapter introduces an approach based on research that can guide writing instruction and provides specific guidance and tools for implementation. Questions open and close the chapters to guide reading and frame future exploration. JoAnn (Jodi) Crandall has written the Epilogue.
Readers will discover ways to move adults into higher education and careers by helping them be college and career ready, to integrate writing into the existing curriculum in adult education programs at all levels, including content classes, and to teach writing according to national and state standards.
This collection offers practical analyses of surveillance and privacy as they occur within classrooms and communities. Organized by themes—surveillance and classrooms, surveillance and bodies, surveillance and culture—Privacy Matters provides writing, rhetoric, and communication scholars and teachers with specific approaches, methods, inquiries, and examinations into the impact tracking and monitoring has upon people’s habits, bodies, and lived experiences.
While each chapter contributes a new perspective in the discipline and beyond, Privacy Matters affirms that these analyses remain inconclusive. This collection is a call for scholars, researchers, activists, and educators within rhetoric and composition to continue the scholarly conversation because privacy matters to all of us.
Contributors: Christina Cedillo, Jenae Cohn, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Dustin Edwards, Norah Fahim, Ann Hill Duin, Gavin P. Johnson, John Peterson, Santos Ramos, Colleen A. Reilly, Jennifer Roth Miller, Jason Tham, Stephanie Vie
At the 2003 "Rock the Vote" debate, one of the questions posed by a student to the eight Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination was "have you ever used marijuana?" Amazingly, all but one of the candidates voluntarily answered the question. Add to this example the multiple ways in which we now see public intrusion into private lives (security cameras, electronic access to personal data, scanning and "wanding" at the airport) or private self-exposure in public forums (cell phones, web cams, confessional talk shows, voyeuristic "reality" TV). That matters so private could be treated as legitimate-in some cases even vital-for public discourse indicates how intertwined the realms of private and public have become in our era. Reverse examples exist as well. Around the world, public authorities look the other way while individual rights are abused--calling it a private matter--or officials appeal to sectarian morés to justify discrimination in public policies.
The authors of The Private, the Public, and the Published feel that scholarship needs to explore and understand this phenomenon, and needs to address it in the college classroom. There are consequences of conflating public and private, they argue--consequences that have implications especially for what is known as the public good. The changing distinctions between "private" and "public," and the various practices of private and public expression, are explored in these essays with an eye toward what they teach us about those consequences and implications.
Education is in crisis—at least, so we hear. And at the center of this crisis is technology. New technologies like computer-based classroom instruction, online K–12 schools, MOOCs (massive open online courses), and automated essay scoring may be our last great hope—or the greatest threat we have ever faced.
In The Problem with Education Technology, Ben Fink and Robin Brown look behind the hype to explain the problems—and potential—of these technologies. Focusing on the case of automated essay scoring, they explain the technology, how it works, and what it does and doesn’t do. They explain its origins, its evolution (both in the classroom and in our culture), and the controversy that surrounds it. Most significantly, they expose the real problem—the complicity of teachers and curriculum-builders in creating an education system so mechanical that machines can in fact often replace humans—and how teachers, students, and other citizens can work together to solve it.
Offering a new perspective on the change that educators can hope, organize, and lobby for, The Problem with Education Technology challenges teachers and activists on “our side,” even as it provides new evidence to counter the profit-making, labor-saving logics that drive the current push for technology in the classroom.
In Process This, Nancy DeJoy argues that even recent revisions to composition studies, cultural studies, service learning, and social process movements--continue to repress the subjects and methodologies that should be central, especially at the level of classroom practice. Designed to move student discourses beyond the classroom, these approaches nonetheless continue to position composition students (and teachers) as mere consumers of the discipline. This means that the subjects, methodologies, and theory/practice relationships that define the field are often absent in composition classrooms.
Arguing that the world inside and outside of the academy cannot be any different if the profession stays the same, DeJoy creates a pedagogy and a plan for faculty development that revisions the prewrite/write/rewrite triad to open spaces for participation and contribution to all members of first-year writing classrooms.
Early on, educators bore the brunt of literacy training, while also being charged with producing the right kind of citizens by imparting civic responsibility and a moral code for the workplace and society. Literacy quickly became the credential to gain legal, economic, and cultural status. In her study, Wan defines three distinct pedagogical spaces for literacy training during the 1910s and 1920s: Americanization and citizenship programs sponsored by the federal government, union-sponsored programs, and first year university writing programs. Wan also demonstrates how each literacy program had its own motivation: the federal government desired productive citizens, unions needed educated members to fight for labor reform, and university educators looked to aid social mobility.
Citing numerous literacy theorists, Wan analyzes the correlation of reading and writing skills to larger currents within American society. She shows how early literacy training coincided with the demand for laborers during the rise of mass manufacturing, while also providing an avenue to economic opportunity for immigrants. This fostered a rhetorical link between citizenship, productivity, and patriotism. Wan supplements her analysis with an examination of citizen training books, labor newspapers, factory manuals, policy documents, public deliberations on citizenship and literacy, and other materials from the period to reveal the goal and rationale behind each program.
Wan relates the enduring bond of literacy and citizenship to current times, by demonstrating the use of literacy to mitigate economic inequality, and its lasting value to a productivity-based society. Today, as in the past, educators continue to serve as an integral part of the literacy training and citizen-making process.
In Professional Academic Writing in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Susan Peck MacDonald tackles important and often controversial contemporary questions regarding the rhetoric of inquiry, the social construction of knowledge, and the professionalization of the academy. MacDonald argues that the academy has devoted more effort to analyzing theory and method than to analyzing its own texts. Professional texts need further attention because they not only create but are also shaped by the knowledge that is special to each discipline. Her assumption is that knowledge-making is the distinctive activity of the academy at the professional level; for that reason, it is important to examine differences in the ways the professional texts of subdisciplinary communities focus on and consolidate knowledge within their fields.
Throughout the book, MacDonald stresses her conviction that academics need to do a better job of explaining their text-making axioms, clarifying their expectations of students at all levels, and monitoring their own professional practices. MacDonald’s proposals for both textual and sentence-level analysis will help academic professionals better understand how they might improve communication within their professional communities and with their students.
Academic leaders, scholars, and faculty who have successfully designed and launched academic programs or faculty development initiatives discuss the theoretical and logistical questions considered in their design, the outcomes they achieved, and how others can emulate them. This exchange of knowledge, insight, experiences, and lessons learned among community members is critical for enabling or inspiring other programs, departments, and institutions to conceive, design, and launch academic programs or faculty development initiatives for their own faculty.
The larger goal of professionalizing is to work with teaching faculty to increase their interactional expertise with multimodal composition, and this collection offers a set of models for how faculty can do that at their own institutions and in their own programs.
Project Management for Researchers tackles the how, what, and why of project management. It offers step-by-step guidance on choosing tools and developing a personalized system that will help the reader manage and organize their research so that steps and decisions are documented for accountability and reproducibility. Readers will find worksheets they can adapt to their own needs, priorities, and research as well as practical tips on issues ranging from emails to scheduling. Suitable for work across methods, experience levels, and disciplines and adaptable for those working alone, with others, or as team managers, this book will guide readers between various research stages–from planning, to execution, to adjustment of research projects big and small.
Drawing upon Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and the branch of philosophical inquiry known as “virtue ethics,” Provocations of Virtue calls for the reclamation of “rhetorical virtues” as a core function in the writing classroom. Duffy considers what these virtues actually are, how they might be taught, and whether they can prepare students to begin repairing the broken state of public argument. In the discourse of the virtues, teachers and scholars of writing are offered a common language and a shared narrative—a story that speaks to the inherent purpose of the writing class and to what is at stake in teaching writing in the twenty-first century.
This book is a timely and historically significant contribution to the field and will be of major interest to scholars and administrators in writing studies, rhetoric, composition, and linguistics as well as philosophers and those exploring ethics.
With a little knowledge and a lot of practice, you can do more than just sound more professional when you skillfully use commas, semicolons, and other forms of punctuation. You can, importantly, become more persuasive.
That’s what students who have taken Professor Patrick Barry’s classes at the University of Michigan Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, and the UCLA School of Law have learned, as have the over 100,000 people who have enrolled in his online course “Good with Words: Writing and Editing” on the educational platforms Coursera and FutureLearn.
Now, thanks to this book, you can undergo that same rhetorical transformation. Punctuation doesn’t have to be a pain point. When properly mastered, it can be a powerful tool for all kinds of advocates.
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