Edited by Winifred Bryan Horner
University of Chicago Press, 1983
Rachel McCabe
Utah State University Press, 2023
Michael J. Zerbe
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007
Nancy Welch
Utah State University Press, 2016
In the face of the gradual saturation of US public education by the logics of neoliberalism, educators often find themselves at a loss to respond, let alone resist. Through state defunding and many other “reforms” fueled by austerity politics, a majority of educators are becoming casual labor in US universities while those who hang onto secure employment are pressed to act as self-supporting entrepreneurs or do more with less. Focusing on the discipline of writing studies, this collection addresses the sense of crisis that many educators experience in this age of austerity.
The chapters in this book chronicle how neoliberal political economy shapes writing assessments, curricula, teacher agency, program administration, and funding distribution. Contributors also focus on how neoliberal political economy dictates the direction of scholarship, because the economic and political agenda shaping the terms of work, the methods of delivery, and the ways of valuing and assessing writing also shape the primary concerns and directions of scholarship.
Composition in the Age of Austerity offers critical accounts of how the restructuring of higher education is shaping the daily realities of composition programs. The book documents the effects and implications of the current restructuring, examines how cherished rhetorical ideals actually leave the field unprepared to respond effectively to defunding and corporatizing trends, and establishes points of departure for collective response.
Edited by Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A. Daiker, and Edward M. White
Southern Illinois University Press, 1997
Despite its pervasiveness and its significance, composition has an unstable status within the curriculum. Writing programs and writing faculty are besieged by academic, political, and financial concerns that have not been well understood or addressed.
At many institutions, composition functions paradoxically as both the gateway to academic success and as the gatekeeper, reducing access to academic work and opportunity for those with limited facility in English. Although writing programs are expected to provide services that range from instruction in correct grammar to assisting—or resisting—political correctness, expanding programs and shrinking faculty get caught in the crossfire. The bottom line becomes the firing line as forces outside the classroom determine funding and seek to define what composition should do.
In search of that definition, the contributors ask and answer a series of specific and salient questions: What implications—intellectual, political, and institutional—will forces outside the classroom have on the quality and delivery of composition in the twenty-first century? How will faculty and administrators identify and address these issues? What policies and practices ought we propose for the century to come?
This book features sixteen position papers by distinguished scholars and researchers in composition and rhetoric; most of the papers are followed by invited responses by other notable compositionists. In all, twenty-five contributors approach composition from a wide variety of contemporary perspectives: rhetorical, historical, social, cultural, political, intellectual, economic, structural, administrative, and developmental. They propose solutions applicable to pedagogy, research, graduate training of composition teachers, academic administration, and public and social policy. In a very real sense, then, this is the only book to offer a map to the future of composition.
Rita Malenczyk
Utah State University Press, 2018
Edited by four nationally recognized leaders of composition scholarship, Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity asks a fundamental question: can Composition and Rhetoric, as a discipline, continue its historical commitment to pedagogy without sacrificing equal attention to other areas, such as research and theory? In response, contributors to the volume address disagreements about what it means to be called a discipline rather than a profession or a field; elucidate tensions over the defined breadth of Composition and Rhetoric; and consider the roles of research and responsibility as Composition and Rhetoric shifts from field to discipline.
Outlining a field with a complex and unusual formation story, Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity employs several lenses for understanding disciplinarity—theory, history, labor, and pedagogy—and for teasing out the implications of disciplinarity for students, faculty, institutions, and Composition and Rhetoric itself. Collectively, the chapters speak to the intellectual and embodied history leading to this point; to questions about how disciplinarity is, and might be, understood, especially with regard to Composition and Rhetoric; to the curricular, conceptual, labor, and other sites of tension inherent in thinking about Composition and Rhetoric as a discipline; and to the implications of Composition and Rhetoric’s disciplinarity for the future.
Contributors: Linda Adler-Kassner, Elizabeth H. Boquet, Christiane Donahue, Whitney Douglas, Doug Downs, Heidi Estrem, Kristine Hansen, Doug Hesse, Sandra Jamieson, Neal Lerner, Jennifer Helene Maher, Barry Maid, Jaime Armin Mejía, Carolyn R. Miller, Kelly Myers, Gwendolynne Reid, Liane Robertson, Rochelle Rodrigo, Dawn Shepherd, Kara Taczak
Ryan Skinnell
Utah State University Press, 2016
Elizabeth C. Britt
University of Alabama Press, 2001
This ground-breaking rhetorical analysis examines a 1987 Massachusetts law affecting infertility treatment and the cultural context that makes such a law possible
Elizabeth C. Britt uses a Massachusetts statute requiring insurance coverage for infertility as a lens through which the work of rhetoric in complex cultural processes can be better understood. Countering the commonsensical notion that mandatory insurance coverage functions primarily to relieve the problem of infertility, Britt argues instead that the coverage serves to expose its contours.
Britt finds that the mandate, operating as a technology of normalization, helps to identify the abnormal (the infertile) and to create procedures by which the abnormal can be subjected to reform. In its role in normalizing processes, the mandate is more successful when it sustains, rather than resolves, the distinction between the normal and the abnormal. This distinction is achieved in part by the rhetorical mechanism of the double bind. For the middle-class white women who are primarily served by the mandate, these double binds are created both by the desire for success, control, and order and by adherence to medical models that often frustrate these same desires. The resulting double binds help to create and sustain the tension between fertility and infertility, order and discontinuity, control and chaos, success and failure, tensions that are essential for the process of normalization to continue.
Britt uses extensive interviews with women undergoing fertility treatments to provide the foundation for her detailed analysis. While her study focuses on the example of infertility, it is also more broadly a commentary on the power of definition to frame experience, on the burdens and responsibilities of belonging to social collectives, and on the ability of rhetorical criticism to interrogate cultural formations.
Craig R. Smith
Michigan State University Press, 2014
Alan Hirvela
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Alan R. Hirvela
University of Michigan Press, 2016
Diane Kelly-Riley
University Press of Colorado, 2024
Diane Kelly-Riley
University Press of Colorado, 2024
V. Jo Hsu
The Ohio State University Press, 2022
Edited by Marie Secor and Davida Charney
Southern Illinois University Press, 1992
In nineteen essays illustrating its many aspects, this book offers an argument for what it takes to construct a complete rhetorical education.
The editors take an approach that is pragmatic and pluralistic, based as it is on the assumptions that a rhetorical education is not limited to teaching freshman composition (or any specific writing course) and that the contexts in which such an education occurs are not limited to classrooms. This thought-provoking volume stresses that while a rhetorical education results in the growth of writing skills, its larger goal is to foster critical thinking.
Jeffrey Cox
University of Iowa Press, 1998
Seth Kahn
University Press of Colorado, 2017
Composition has been a microcosm of the corporatization of higher education for thirty years, with adjuncts often handling the hard work of writing instruction. We've learned enough to know that change is needed. Influenced by the efforts of organizations such as New Faculty Majority, Faculty Forward, PrecariCorps, and national faculty unions, this collection highlights action, describing efforts that have improved adjunct working conditions in English departments. The editors categorize these efforts into five threads: strategies for self-advocacy; organizing within and across ranks; professionalizing in complex contexts; working for local changes to workload, pay, and material conditions; and protecting gains.
Contributors to this collection include contingent and tenure-line faculty from private, public, and community colleges, as well as writing program administrators and writing center faculty. Their voices address contingency, exploitation, and solidarity in activist terms deriving from institutional realities and cases. Collectively, they offer creative and constructive responses that can enact labor justice and champion the disciplinary energies of all members of our collegial community.
Contributors: Janelle Adsit, Jacob Babb, Chris Blankenship, Rebekah Shultz Colby, Richard Colby, Anicca Cox, Sue Doe, Tracy Donhardt, Dawn Fels, Barbara Heifferon, Desirée M. Holter, Justin Jory, Jeffrey Klausman, Michelle LaFrance, Sarah Layden, Carol Lind, Maria Maisto, Amanda Martin, Mark McBeth, Tim McCormack, Joan Mullin, Dani Nier-Weber, Glenn Moomau, Michael Murphy, Anna K. Nardo, Rolf Norgaard, Courtney Adams Wooten, Lacey Wootton, Allison Laubach Wright
Christine Pearson Casanave
University of Michigan Press, 2017
Christine Pearson Casanave
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Jane Donawerth
Southern Illinois University Press, 2011
Edited by Donovan Conley and Justin Eckstein
University of Alabama Press, 2020
The rhetoric of contemporary food production and consumption with a focus on social boundaries
The rhetoric of food is more than just words about food, and food is more than just edible matter. Cookery: Food Rhetorics and Social Production explores how food mediates both rhetorical influence and material life through the overlapping concepts of invention and production. The classical canon of rhetorical invention entails the process of discovering one’s persuasive appeals, whereas the contemporary landscape of agricultural production touches virtually everyone on the planet. Together, rhetoric and food shape the boundaries of shared living.
The essays in this volume probe the many ways that food informs contemporary social life through its mediation of bodies—human and extra-human alike—in the forms of intoxication, addiction, estrangement, identification, repulsion, and eroticism. Our bodies, in turn, shape the boundaries of food through research, technology, cultural trends, and, of course, by talking about it.
Each chapter explores food’s persuasive nature through a unique prism that includes intoxication, dirt, “food porn,” strange foods, and political “invisibility.” Each case offers new insights about the relations between rhetorical influence and embodied practice through food. As a whole Cookery articulates new ways of viewing food’s powers of persuasion, as well as the inherent role of persuasion in agricultural production.
The purpose of Cookery, then, is to demonstrate the deep rhetoricity of our modern industrial food system through critical examinations of concepts, practices, and tendencies endemic to this system. Food has become an essential topic for discussions concerned with the larger social dynamics of production, distribution, access, reception, consumption, influence, and the fraught question of choice. These questions about food and rhetoric are equally questions about the assumptions, values, and practices of contemporary public life.
Barbara Schneider
University of Alabama Press, 2021
Examines public discourse from the Progressive Era over the state’s right to regulate women’s bodies and their reproduction
When Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes determined in 1927 that sterilization was a legitimate means of safeguarding the nation’s health, he was asserting the state’s right to regulate the production of the national body. His opinion represented a culmination of arguments about reproduction and immigration that had been circulating for years but that intensified during the Progressive Era. Arguments about reproductive and immigration practices surged to the foreground, and tectonic shifts in the conceptual schemes and practices of reproduction in the United States followed.
Drawing on feminist historiography and genre studies, Corporal Rhetoric: Regulating Reproduction in the Progressive Era explores the rhetoric of medical research, new technologies, and material practices that shifted the idea of childbirth as an act of God or Nature to a medical procedure enacted by male physicians on the bodies of women made passive by both drugs and discourse. Barbara Schneider considers how efficiency, the hallmark of scientific management, was raised to a cardinal virtue by its inclusions in the powerful mediums of presidential speeches, national educational policies, and eugenics discourse to reclassify babies, long regarded as gifts, as either valuable assets or defective products.
Schneider shows how the legal system drew upon medicine, scientific management, and the emerging discipline of sociology to restrict women’s labor in order to preserve reproductive capacity, categorized by Supreme Court opinions as a public good rather than a private capacity. Throughout, she ties the arguments developed during this era to current debates about mothering rhetorics, reproductive rights, immigration, and conceptions of the nation.
By weaving together medical research reports, clinical practices, case studies, legal opinions and legislative acts, and the epistemology of scientific management, Schneider illuminates the network that women such as Margaret Sanger, Jane Addams, Lillian Gilbreth and multiple others negotiated as they sought to give women room to exercise their reproductive capacity. Through her analysis of the machinery of these discourses and the material uptake of their genres in the daily practices of reproductive bodies, Schneider offers a provisional theory of corporal rhetoric that begins to answer the call for a new material theory of the body.
Xiaoye You
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
Frankie Condon
Utah State University Press, 2021
April L. O'Brien and James Chase Sanchez
University of Alabama Press, 2025
Investigates the interdisciplinary dimensions of countermemory through a rhetorical lens
Countermemory: A Rhetoric of Resistance by April L. O’Brien and James Chase Sanchez is a groundbreaking monograph that explores the concept of countermemory from an interdisciplinary and rhetorical perspective. The authors define “countermemory” as remembrance that resituates often overlooked or erased narratives of marginalized groups by positioning these memories as equally significant to dominant historical narratives. This work investigates how countermemories emerge in response to public memories, highlighting the tensions and resistance that arise when marginalized voices challenge mainstream historical accounts.
Through a mixed-methodological approach—incorporating site-based analysis, participant observation, textual analysis, and historiography—O’Brien and Sanchez examine countermemory in both physical and digital spaces. From memorial sites and museums to music videos, TV shows, and digital maps, they reveal the various ways countermemory operates and persists. The authors focus particularly on countermemory in the American South, centering on the experiences and histories of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities.
Countermemory is essential reading for scholars and students of rhetoric and public memory. The book also offers rich insights to readers who are passionate about addressing issues of racial inequality, people interested in examining their own experiences and the role they can play in promoting social change, and those interested in exploring the ways in which history is constructed and presented, and how marginalized perspectives are often excluded or distorted.
John Durham Peters
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Jeff Rice
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
Janet Giannotti
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Nicole B. Wallack
Utah State University Press, 2016
Michael J. Lee
Michigan State University Press, 2014
Christine B. Feak & John M. Swales
University of Michigan Press, 2011
Research article introductions are central to Creating Contexts: Writing across Genres with the CaRS (creating a research space) model used as a starting point. This volume focuses on introductions for other kinds of texts that are also part of the graduate student writing experience such as course papers and critiques, proposals, and dissertations.
This volume represents a revision and expansion of the material on introductions that appeared in English in Today's Research World.
The material presented in this volume is appropriate for graduate students and others already working in their chosen academic fields. The material has, in fact, been used with each of these groups in both writing courses and writing workshops. We believe that the material would also be suitable for those wishing to pursue a course of self-study. To target these different possible uses, we have included a variety of topics and tasks that we hope will deepen users’ understanding of how to create a writing context for their work. Tasks range from evaluating text commentaries to open-ended questions and have been designed to generate lively classroom or workshop discussion as well as thoughtful consideration by an individual user.
Edited by Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley
Southern Illinois University Press, 2015
A. Suresh Canagarajah
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Angela Laflen
Utah State University Press, 2025
Chris M Anson
University Press of Colorado, 2017
Wayne C. Booth
University of Chicago Press, 1979
Edited by Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010
Cross-Language Relations in Composition brings together the foremost scholars in the fields of composition, second language writing, education, and literacy studies to address the limitations of the tacit English-only policy prevalent in composition pedagogy and research and to suggest changes for the benefit of writing students and instructors throughout the United States. Recognizing the growing linguistic diversity of students and faculty, the ongoing changes in the English language as a result of globalization, and the increasingly blurred categories of native, foreign, and second language English speakers, editors Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda have compiled a groundbreaking anthology of essays that contest the dominance of English monolingualism in the study and teaching of composition and encourage the pursuit of approaches that embrace multilingualism and cross-language writing as the norm for teaching and research.
The nine chapters comprising part 1 of the collection focus on the origins of the “English only” bias dominating U.S. composition classes and present alternative methods of teaching and research that challenge this monolingualism. In part 2, nine composition teachers and scholars representing a variety of theoretical, institutional, and professional perspectives propose new, compelling, and concrete ways to understand and teach composition to students of a “global,” plural English, a language evolving in a multilingual world.
Drawing on recent theoretical work on genre, complexity, performance and identity, as well as postcolonialism, Cross-Language Relations in Composition offers a radically new approach to composition teaching and research, one that will prove invaluable to all who teach writing in today’s multilingual college classroom.
Barbara Couture
Utah State University Press, 2016
With growing anxiety about American identity fueling debates about the nation’s borders, ethnicities, and languages, Crossing Borders, Drawing Boundaries provides a timely and important rhetorical exploration of divisionary bounds that divide an Us from a Them. The concept of “border” calls for attention, and the authors in this collection respond by describing it, challenging it, confounding it, and, at times, erasing it.
Motivating us to see anew the many lines that unite, divide, and define us, the essays in this volume highlight how discourse at borders and boundaries can create or thwart conditions for establishing identity and admitting difference. Each chapter analyzes how public discourse at the site of physical or metaphorical borders presents or confounds these conditions and, consequently, effective participation—a key criterion for a modern democracy. The settings are various, encompassing vast public spaces such as cities and areas within them; the rhetorical spaces of history books, museum displays, activist events, and media outlets; and the intimate settings of community and classroom conversations.
Crossing Borders, Drawing Boundaries shows how rich communication can be when diverse cultures intersect and create new opportunities for human connection, even while different populations, cultures, age groups, and political parties adopt irreconcilable positions. It will be of interest to scholars in rhetoric and literacy studies and students in rhetorical analysis and public discourse.
Contributors include Andrea Alden, Cori Brewster, Robert Brooke, Randolph Cauthen, Jennifer Clifton, Barbara Couture, Vanessa Cozza, Anita C. Hernández, Roberta J. Herter, Judy Holiday, Elenore Long, José A. Montelongo, Karen P. Peirce, Jonathan P. Rossing, Susan A. Schiller, Christopher Schroeder, Tricia C. Serviss, Mónica Torres, Kathryn Valentine, Victor Villanueva, and Patti Wojahn.
Bruce Horner
Utah State University Press, 2017
Translingualism perceives the boundaries between languages as unstable and permeable; this creates a complex challenge for writing pedagogy. Writers shift actively among rhetorical strategies from multiple languages, sometimes importing lexical or discoursal tropes from one language into another to introduce an effect, solve a problem, or construct an identity. How to accommodate this reality while answering the charge to teach the conventions of one language can be a vexing problem for teachers. Crossing Divides offers diverse perspectives from leading scholars on the design and implementation of translingual writing pedagogies and programs.
The volume is divided into four parts. Part 1 outlines methods of theorizing translinguality in writing and teaching. Part 2 offers three accounts of translingual approaches to the teaching of writing in private and public colleges and universities in China, Korea, and the United States. In Part 3, contributors from four US institutions describe the challenges and strategies involved in designing and implementing a writing curriculum with a translingual approach. Finally, in Part 4, three scholars respond to the case studies and arguments of the preceding chapters and suggest ways in which writing teachers, scholars, and program administrators can develop translingual approaches within their own pedagogical settings.
Illustrated with concrete examples of teachers’ and program directors’ efforts in a variety of settings, as well as nuanced responses to these initiatives from eminent scholars of language difference in writing, Crossing Divides offers groundbreaking insight into translingual writing theory, practice, and reflection.
Contributors: Sara Alvarez, Patricia Bizzell, Suresh Canagarajah, Dylan Dryer, Chris Gallagher, Juan Guerra, Asao B. Inoue, William Lalicker, Thomas Lavelle, Eunjeong Lee, Jerry Lee, Katie Malcolm, Kate Mangelsdorf, Paige Mitchell, Matt Noonan, Shakil Rabbi, Ann Shivers-McNair, Christine M. Tardy
Catherine C. Braun
Southern Illinois University Press, 2014
Braun’s in-depth study documents English professors and the challenges they face in both career and classroom as they attempt to gain appropriate value for digital teaching and creation within their field, departments, and institutions. Braun proposes that to move English studies into the future, three main questions must be addressed. First, what counts as a text? How should we approach the reading of texts? Finally, how should we approach the production of texts? In addition to reconsidering the nature of texts in English studies, she calls for crucial changes in higher-education institutional procedures themselves, including new methods of evaluating digital scholarship on an even playing field with other forms of work during the processes for promotion and tenure.
With insightful expertise, Braun analyzes how the new age of digital scholarship not only complements the traditional values of the English studies discipline but also offers constructive challenges to old ideas about texts, methods, and knowledge production. Cultivating Ecologies for Digital Media Work is the first volume to offer specific examination of the digital shift’s impact on English studies and provides the scaffold upon which productive conversations about the future of the field and digital pedagogy can be built.
Amanda Nell Edgar
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
Roger M. Keesing
University of Chicago Press, 1992