991 books match the query 'Writing' and 77 start with c

cover of Constructing Rhetorical Education

Constructing Rhetorical Education

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.

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cover of Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition and Writing

Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition and Writing

Patricia Portanova

University Press of Colorado, 2017

Perspectives on Writing series
Co-Published with CSU Open Press
 
Since the 1980s, even as international writing scholars have embraced cognitive science, the number of studies building on research in writing and cognition has decreased in the United States. Despite this decline, significant interest and ongoing research in this critical area continues. Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition and Writing explores the historical context of cognitive studies, the importance to our field of studies in neuroscience, the applicability of habits of mind, and the role of cognition in literate development and transfer. These works—each of which offers a timely contribution to research, teaching, and learning in the composition classroom—are book-ended by a foreword and afterword by cognition and writing pioneers John Hayes and Linda Flower. This collection, as a result, offers a historical marker of where we were in cognitive studies and where we might go.
 
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cover of Content Machines: Reading and Writing in the Platform Era

Content Machines

Reading and Writing in the Platform Era

Sarah Brouillette

Duke University Press, 2026

While much has been said about the democratization of publishing through the rise of platforms like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, little attention has been paid to the broader effect these technologies have had on writers, readers, and the publishing industry. In Content Machines, Sarah Brouillette considers how short-form, platform-based, and social media writing on digital mediums like Wattpad and TikTok has reshaped modern publishing, reading, and writing. Brouillette identifies three mutually reinforcing processes that platform capitalism entangles in the publishing industry: the marked feminization of book work; the rise of a bibliotherapeutic vocabulary that grounds reading and writing as self-care work; and the growth of platform-based processes that cheapen content and intensify the pressure to engage in self-promotion and entrepreneurial strategizing. She breaks down the business models that have been key to this transformation and traces the social conditions that make online self-published fiction, especially young adult, romance, and fantasy stories, into spaces for community while, conversely, signaling how these publishing practices depend upon undervalued and feminized labor from marginalized groups. Content Machines is a much-needed survey of the contours of the modern reading and writing landscape.
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cover of Contingency, Exploitation, and Solidarity: Labor and Action in English Composition

Contingency, Exploitation, and Solidarity

Labor and Action in English Composition

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 Heiffero​n, ​Desirée M. Holter​, ​Justin Jory​, ​Jeffrey Klausman​, ​Michelle LaFrance​, ​Sarah Layden​, ​Carol Lind​, ​Maria Maist​o, ​Amanda Martin​, ​Mark McBeth​, ​Tim McCormack​, ​Joan Mulli​n, ​Dani Nier-Weber​, ​Glenn Moomau​, ​Michael Murphy​, ​Anna K. Nardo​, ​Rolf Norgaard​, ​Courtney Adams Wooten​, ​Lacey Wootton​, ​Allison Laubach Wright

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cover of Controversies in Second Language Writing, Second Edition: Dilemmas and Decisions in Research and Instruction

Controversies in Second Language Writing, Second Edition

Dilemmas and Decisions in Research and Instruction

Christine Pearson Casanave

University of Michigan Press, 2017

In the years since the first edition of Controversies in Second Language Writing was published, there been little to no clear resolution of the controversies Casanave so accessibly and fair-mindedly laid out. In fact, many of them have become far more complex and intertwined with many other 21st century issues that teachers of L2 writing cannot help but be affected by in their classrooms. Therefore, this second edition has set out to address: What issues if any have been resolved? What issues have had lasting power from the past, either because people are resistant to change or because the issues continue to be unresolved ones that writing teachers and scholars need to keep discussing?

The second edition is a thorough revision with all chapters updated to refer to works written since the first edition was published. A few chapters have been added: one devoted to writing in a digital era (Chapter 3); one devoted to the debates about English as a lingua franca, "translingual literacy practices," and other hybrid uses of English that have been ongoing in the last ten years (Chapter 4); and one giving special attention to issues related to writing from sources and plagiarism (Chapter 6).

As with the first edition, the second edition of Controversies is not a book that will teach readers how to do things. Rather, it is a book designed to help readers think and to wrestle with issues in L2 writing that are not easily resolved by how-to prescriptions.
 
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cover of Controversies in Second Language Writing: Dilemmas and Decisions in Research and Instruction

Controversies in Second Language Writing

Dilemmas and Decisions in Research and Instruction

Christine Pearson Casanave

University of Michigan Press, 2003

Controversies in Second Language Writing is not a how-to book, but one that focuses on how teachers in L2 writing can be helped to make reasoned decisions by understanding some of the key issues and conflicting opinions about L2 writing research and pedagogy. This book will assist teachers in making informed decisions about teaching writing in the ESL classroom.
To counteract some of the debates, Casanave explores the different sides of the arguments and provides examples of how other teachers have dealt with these issues. The book presents novice and seasoned teachers with thought-provoking issues and questions to consider when determining and reflecting on their own teaching strategies and criteria.
Topics discussed include:
contrastive rhetoric
product vs. process
fluency and accuracy
assessment of student work
audience
plagiarism
politics and ideology.
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cover of Cosmopolitan English and Transliteracy

Cosmopolitan English and Transliteracy

Xiaoye You

Southern Illinois University Press, 2016

Winner, CCCC Research Impact Award, 2018

Despite the vast number of multilingual speakers in the United States and the pervasive influence of globalization, writing studies in this country is still inextricably linked to a nationalistic, monolingual English ideology. In Cosmopolitan English and Transliteracy, Xiaoye You addresses this issue by proposing that writing studies programs adopt a cosmopolitan perspective. Emphasizing local and global forms of citizenship and identification, You merges a humanistic vision with the rigor of social science, arguing that linguistic and cultural differences can be explored to recover human connections normally severed by geographical and semiotic borders.

You examines several areas of writing affected by globalization. He then turns to the composition classroom, highlighting the challenges and possibilities of crossing cultural boundaries in academic discourse before introducing a pedagogy aimed at fostering American students’ translingual and transcultural sensibilities. Included is a model for training writing teachers in the context of globalization, which aims to help instructors gain practical knowledge about the needs and resources of multilingual writers through communication technologies and cross-cultural partnerships.

By introducing cosmopolitan perspectives into the composition classroom, You challenges traditional assumptions about language, identity, and literacy as they relate to writing studies. Innovative and provocative, Cosmopolitan English and Transliteracy charts a new way forward for writing programs, with a call to focus on global rather than national identity.
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cover of CounterStories from the Writing Center

CounterStories from the Writing Center

Frankie Condon

Utah State University Press, 2021

CounterStories from the Writing Center gathers emerging scholars of colour and their white accomplices to challenge some of the most cherished lore about the work of writing centres. Writing within an intersectional feminist frame, this volume’s contributors name and critique the dominant role that white, straight, cis-gendered women have played in writing centre administration as well as in the field of writing centre studies. This work will shake the field’s core assumptions about itself.
 
Practicing what Derrick Bell has termed “creative truth telling,” these writers are not concerned with individual white women in writing centres but with the social, political, and cultural capital that is the historical birthright of white, straight, cis-gendered women, particularly in writing centre studies. The essays collected in this volume test, defy, and overflow the bounds of traditional academic discourse in the service of powerful testimony, witness, and counterstory.
 
CounterStories from the Writing Center is a must-read for writing centre directors, scholars, and tutors who are committed to antiracist pedagogy and offers a robust intersectional analysis to those who seek to understand the relationship between the work of writing centres and the problem of racism. Accessible and usable for both graduate and undergraduate students of writing centre theory and practice, this work troubles the field’s commonplaces and offers a rich envisioning of what writing centres materially committed to inclusion and equity might be and do.
 
Contributors: Dianna Baldwin, Nicole Caswell, Mitzi Ceballos, Romeo Garcia, Neisha-Anne Green, Doug Kern, T. Haltiwanger Morrison, Bernice Olivas, Moira Ozias, Trixie Smith, Willow Trevino
 
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cover of Crafting Compositions: Tools for Today's Writers

Crafting Compositions

Tools for Today's Writers

Janet Giannotti

University of Michigan Press, 2004

Crafting Compositions guides students through the entire writing process, with exercises in planning, drafting, responding and revising, and polishing. In addition to completing free writing exercises, keeping a journal of informal responses, and revising sample compositions, students will draft, revise, and edit one composition per chapter.

The textbook features:
"Authentic readings to foster vocabulary development, show successful techniques, and serve as a jumping-off point for free writing.
"A "learning log" in which students write to practice the writing lessons and tips presented.
"A two-track system in which students simultaneously work with the writing of other students as they work on their own compositions.
"Toolbox mini-lessons to review common grammar trouble spots.

This mid-level writing text is appropriate for high school, community college, or university course
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cover of Crafting Presence: The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies

Crafting Presence

The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies

Nicole B. Wallack

Utah State University Press, 2016

Essays are central to students’ and teachers’ development as thinkers in their fields. In Crafting Presence, Nicole B. Wallack develops an approach to teaching writing with the literary essay that holds promise for writing students, as well as for achieving a sense of common purpose currently lacking among professionals in composition, creative writing, and literature.
 
Wallack analyzes examples drawn primarily from volumes of The Best American Essays to illuminate the most important quality of the essay as a literary form: the writer’s “presence.” She demonstrates how accounting for presence provides a flexible and rigorous heuristic for reading the contexts, formal elements, and purposes of essays. Such readings can help students learn writing principles, practices, and skills for crafting myriad presences rather than a single voice.
 
Crafting Presence holds serious implications for writing pedagogy by providing new methods to help teachers and students become more insightful and confident readers and writers of essays. At a time when liberal arts education faces significant challenges, this important contribution to literary studies, composition, and creative writing shows how an essay-centered curriculum empowers students to show up in the world as public thinkers who must shape the “knowledge economy” of the twenty-first century.
 
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cover of Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century

Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley

Southern Illinois University Press, 2015

The creative writing workshop: beloved by some, dreaded by others, and ubiquitous in writing programs across the nation. For decades, the workshop has been entrenched as the primary pedagogy of creative writing. While the field of creative writing studies has sometimes myopically focused on this single method, the related discipline of composition studies has made use of numerous pedagogical models. In Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century, editors Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley gather experts from both creative writing and composition studies to offer innovative alternatives to the traditional creative writing workshop.
 
Drawing primarily from the field of composition studies—a discipline rich with a wide range of established pedagogies—the contributors in this volume build on previous models to present fresh and inventive methods for the teaching of creative writing. Each chapter offers both a theoretical and a historical background for its respective pedagogical ideas, as well as practical applications for use in the classroom. This myriad of methods can be used either as a supplement to the customary workshop model or as stand-alone roadmaps to engage and reinvigorate the creative process for both students and teachers alike.
 
A fresh and inspiring collection of teaching methods, Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century combines both conventional and cutting-edge techniques to expand the pedagogical possibilities in creative writing studies.
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cover of Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation

Crimes of Writing

Problems in the Containment of Representation

Susan Stewart

Duke University Press, 1994

From the origins of modern copyright in early eighteenth-century culture to the efforts to represent nature and death in postmodern fiction, this book explores a series of problems regarding the containment of representation. Stewart focuses on specific cases of "crimes of writing"—the forgeries of George Psalmanazar; the production of "fakelore"; the "ballad scandals" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the imposture of Thomas Chatterton; and contemporary legislation regarding graffiti and pornography. She emphasizes the issues that arise once language is seen as a matter of property, and authorship is viewed as a matter of originality. Finally, Stewart demonstrates that crimes of writing are delineated by the law because they specifically undermine the status of the law itself: the crimes illuminate the irreducible fact that law is written and therefore subject to temporality and interpretation. This valuable and pioneering work, originally published in 1991 (Oxford University Press), will be of interest to literary and legal theorists, folklorists, anthropologists, and scholars of eighteenth-century and postmodern culture.
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cover of Cripping Labor-Based Grading for More Equity in Literacy Courses

Cripping Labor-Based Grading for More Equity in Literacy Courses

Asao B. Inoue

University Press of Colorado, 2024

Writing in response to recent work by Kathleen Kryger, Griffin X. Zimmerman, and Ellen C. Carillo, Asao B. Inoue offers an expanded and compassionate discussion of labor-based grading, a practice that involves negotiating a set of classroom agreements with all of the students in a course to determine how much labor will be expected of students and how it will be accounted for or identified to earn particular final course grades. Inoue focuses his exploration of labor-based grading by asking, “How can labor-based grading evolve so that it addresses the concerns around inequitable access to or expectations of labor that students with disabilities, neurodivergencies, illnesses, or limited time in the semester may face?” The result is a thoughtful re-examination and re-thinking of labor-based grading in writing courses.
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cover of Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students

Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students

A. Suresh Canagarajah

University of Michigan Press, 2002

The critical approach to L2 writing is arguably one of the most significant recent developments in L2 writing pedagogy. A. Suresh Canagarajah provides a thorough discussion of this topic in Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students.
This volume facilitates teacher self-reflection and enables readers to better understand the motivations and pedagogical implications--especially for L2 writing--of a more openly pedagogical approach.
Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students explains what it means to commit to an academic pedagogy, in terms of form, self, content, and community--and what it can accomplish in the L2 writing classroom. It's a guide for writing teachers who wish to embark on a journey toward increased critical awareness of the role they play, or potentially could play, in the lives of their students.
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cover of Critical Data Storytelling in the Composition Classroom

Critical Data Storytelling in the Composition Classroom

Angela Laflen

Utah State University Press, 2025

Critical Data Storytelling in the Composition Classroom provides a timely and essential framework for integrating data literacy into multimodal composition pedagogy. Angela Laflen demonstrates that in an era dominated by big data and AI, the need to understand how to work with data is no longer limited to scientists and mathematicians. Instead, data literacy has become a crucial skill for participating in democratic society.
 
At the heart of Laflen’s approach is critical data storytelling—a practice that equips students with the skills to understand, interpret, and ethically communicate with and about data through various multimodal formats. By teaching students to make informed decisions as data storytellers, Laflen addresses the ethical implications of working with data while offering practical strategies for reading and analyzing data stories. This approach empowers both students and teachers to engage critically with data as a tool for learning and communication. It also highlights how multimodal composition has yet to fully account for the central role of data in shaping contemporary communication and argumentation.
 
By focusing on the ethical and rhetorical dimensions of data storytelling, Critical Data Storytelling in the Composition Classroompresents a pedagogical approach that prepares students for the challenges of working with data in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. This flexible, adaptable model for teaching critical data literacy is of great interest to writing instructors, scholars in rhetoric and composition, and educators who seek to prepare students for the demands of a data-driven world.
 
 
 
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cover of Critical Perspectives on Academic Writing: The politics and Practices of Writing Development in UK Higher Education

Critical Perspectives on Academic Writing

The politics and Practices of Writing Development in UK Higher Education

Edited by Ayanna Prevatt-Goldstein and David Mallows

University College London, 2026

This volume addresses the most pressing issues in higher education today, such as inclusion, academic integrity, and generative AI.

This timely collection explores the politics and practices of academic writing development in UK higher education. The volume addresses issues of access, equity, and generative AI in the context of student writing, to consider what makes writing academic, why it matters, and how we can change the field for the better.

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cover of Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer

Critical Transitions

Writing and the Question of Transfer

Chris M Anson

University Press of Colorado, 2017

In Critical Transitions: Writing and the Question of Transfer, Chris Anson and Jessie Moore offer an important new collection about prior learning and transfer theories that asks what writing knowledge should transfer, how we might recognize that transfer, and what the significance is—from a global perspective—of understanding knowledge transformation related to writing. The contributors examine strategies for supporting writers' transfer at key critical transitions, including transitions from high-school to college, from first-year writing to writing in the major and in the disciplines, between self-sponsored and academic writing, and between languages. The collection concludes with an epilogue offering next steps in studying and designing for writing transfer.

Contributors: Linda Adler-Kassner, Chris M. Anson, Stuart Blythe, Scott Chien-Hsiung Chiu, Irene Clark, Nicolette Mercer Clement, Stacey M. Cozart, Gita DasBender, Christiane Donahue, Dana Lynn Driscoll, Dana R. Ferris, Gwen Gorzelsky, Regina A. McManigell Grijalva, Carol Hayes, Hogan Hayes, Tine Wirenfeldt Jensen, Ed Jones, Ketevan Kupatadze, Jessie L. Moore, Joe Paszek, Donna Qualley, Liane Robertson, Paula Rosinski, Kara Taczak, Elizabeth Wardle, Carl Whithaus, Gitte Wichmann-Hansen, Kathleen Blake Yancey
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cover of Cross-Language Relations in Composition

Cross-Language Relations in Composition

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.

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cover of Crossing Borders, Drawing Boundaries: The Rhetoric of Lines across America

Crossing Borders, Drawing Boundaries

The Rhetoric of Lines across America

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.

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cover of Crossing Divides: Exploring Translingual Writing Pedagogies and Programs

Crossing Divides

Exploring Translingual Writing Pedagogies and Programs

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

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cover of Cruel Auteurism: Affective Digital Mediations toward Film-Composition

Cruel Auteurism

Affective Digital Mediations toward Film-Composition

bonnie lenore kyburz

University Press of Colorado, 2019

bonnie lenore kyburz' reflective and deeply felt sense of (her) place in Composition creates room to consider some of the rhetorical dimensions and pedagogical implications of film work in writing classrooms and as digital scholarship. Invoking affect theorist Lauren Berlant's concept of "cruel optimism" to articulate the findings of her archival, analytical, and experiential methods, Cruel Auteurism describes a cultural shift within the discipline, from the primacy of print-based arguments, through an evolving desire to generate cinematic rhetorics, toward increasingly visible forms of textual practice currently shaping composition classrooms and digital scholarship.
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cover of Cultivating Ecologies for Digital Media Work: The Case of English Studies

Cultivating Ecologies for Digital Media Work

The Case of English Studies

Catherine C. Braun

Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

The onslaught of the digital age has rapidly redefined the parameters of virtually every aspect of daily life, and the world of academic scholarship is no exception. In English departments across American institutions of higher education, faculty members face an uphill battle in the struggle for professional recognition of their digital works. In Cultivating Ecologies for Digital Media Work, author Catherine C. Braun calls for a shift in thinking about the professional methods and digital goals of the English studies discipline and its central texts.

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.

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cover of Cultural Graphology: Writing after Derrida

Cultural Graphology

Writing after Derrida

Juliet Fleming

University of Chicago Press, 2016

“Cultural Graphology” could be the name of a new human science: this was Derrida’s speculation when, in the late 1960s, he imagined a discipline that combined psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and a commitment to the topic of writing. He never undertook the project himself but did leave two brief sketches of how he thought cultural graphology might proceed. In this book, Juliet Fleming picks up where Derrida left off. Using both his early and later thought, and the psychoanalytic texts to which it is addressed, to examine the print culture of early modern England, she drastically unsettles some key assumptions of book history.

Fleming shows that the single most important lesson to survive from Derrida’s early work is that we do not know what writing is. Channeling Derrida’s thought into places it has not been seen before, she examines printed errors, spaces, and ornaments (topics that have hitherto been marginal to our accounts of print culture) and excavates the long-forgotten reading practice of cutting printed books. Proposing radical deformations to the meanings of fundamental and apparently simple terms such as “error,” “letter,” “surface,” and “cut,” Fleming opens up exciting new pathways into our understanding of writing all told.
 
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cover of Culture Concept: Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism

Culture Concept

Writing and Difference in the Age of Realism

Michael A. Elliott

University of Minnesota Press, 2002

Examines the prehistory of the American struggle to address cultural difference.

"Culture" is a term we commonly use to explain the differences in our ways of living. In this book Michael A. Elliott returns to the moment this usage was first articulated, tracing the concept of culture to the writings-folktales, dialect literature, local color sketches, and ethnographies-that provided its intellectual underpinnings in turn-of-the-century America.

The Culture Concept explains how this now-familiar definition of "culture" emerged during the late nineteenth century through the intersection of two separate endeavors that shared a commitment to recording group-based difference-American literary realism and scientific ethnography. Elliott looks at early works of cultural studies as diverse as the conjure tales of Charles Chesnutt, the Ghost Dance ethnography of James Mooney, and the prose narrative of the Omaha anthropologist-turned-author Francis La Flesche. His reading of these works-which struggle to find appropriate theoretical and textual tools for articulating a less chauvinistic understanding of human difference-is at once a recovery of a lost connection between American literary realism and ethnography and a productive inquiry into the usefulness of the culture concept as a critical tool in our time and times to come.
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cover of Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America

Cultures of Letters

Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America

Richard H. Brodhead

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Using a variety of historical sources, Richard H. Brodhead reconstructs the institutionalized literary worlds that coexisted in nineteenth-century America: the middle-class domestic culture of letters, the culture of mass-produced cheap reading, the militantly hierarchical high culture of post-emancipation black education. He describes how these socially structured worlds of writing shaped the terms of literary practice for writers like Stowe, Hawthorne, Fanny Fern, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Charles Chesnutt.
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cover of Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing

Curious Attractions

Essays on Fiction Writing

Debra Spark

University of Michigan Press, 2005

Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing is a book about what makes fiction work. In nine entertaining and instructive essays, novelist and master teacher Debra Spark pursues key questions that face both aspiring and accomplished writers, including: How does a writer find inspiration? What makes a story's closing line resonate? How can a writer "get" style? Where should an author "stand" in relation to his or her characters?

While the book will have immediate appeal for students of writing, it will also be of interest to general readers for its in-depth reading of contemporary fiction and for its take on important issues of the day: Should writers try to be more uplifting? How is emotion best conveyed in fiction? Why are serious writers in North America wedded to the realist tradition?

When she was only twenty-three, Debra Spark's best-selling anthology 20 Under 30 introduced readers to some of today's best writers, including David Leavitt, Susan Minot, Lorrie Moore, Ann Patchett, and Mona Simpson. Almost twenty years later, Spark brings this same keen critical eye to Curious Attractions, discussing a broad range of authors from multiple genres and generations.

A collection of essays in the belles-lettres tradition, Curious Attractions offers lively and instructive discussions of craft flavored with autobiographical reflections and commentary on world events. Throughout, Spark's voice is warm, articulate, and engaging as it provides valuable insights to readers and writers alike.
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cover of Códice Maya de México: Understanding the Oldest Surviving Book of the Americas

Códice Maya de México

Understanding the Oldest Surviving Book of the Americas

Andrew D. Turner

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2022

An in-depth exploration of the history, authentication, and modern relevance of Códice Maya de México, the oldest surviving book of the Americas.
 
Ancient Maya scribes recorded prophecies and astronomical observations on the pages of painted books. Although most were lost to decay or destruction, three pre-Hispanic Maya codices were known to have survived, when, in the 1960s, a fourth book that differed from the others appeared in Mexico under mysterious circumstances. After fifty years of debate over its authenticity, recent investigations using cutting-edge scientific and art historical analyses determined that Códice Maya de México (formerly known as Grolier Codex) is in fact the oldest surviving book of the Americas, predating all others by at least two hundred years.
 
This volume provides a multifaceted introduction to the creation, discovery, interpretation, and scientific authentication of Códice Maya de México. In addition, a full-color facsimile and a page-by-page guide to the iconography make the codex accessible to a wide audience. Additional topics include the uses and importance of sacred books in Mesoamerica, the role of astronomy in ancient Maya societies, and the codex's continued relevance to contemporary Maya communities.
 
This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from October 18, 2022, to January 15, 2023.
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