Results by title

991 books match the query 'Writing' and 26 start with i

cover of I Give You Half the Road

I Give You Half the Road

Carol Spindel

University of Wisconsin Press, 2021

In Ivory Coast, the farewell “I give you half the road” is an expression of hospitality, urging a departing guest to come back again. After their first stay in a welcoming rural community in 1981, Carol Spindel and her husband did just that. Over the course of decades, they built a house and returned frequently, deepening their relationships with neighbors.

Once considered the most stable country in West Africa, Ivory Coast was split by an armed rebellion in 2002 and endured a decade of instability and a violent conflict. Spindel provides an intimate glimpse into this turbulent period by weaving together the daily lives and paths of five neighbors. Their stories reveal Ivorians determined to reunite a divided country through reliance on mutual respect and obligation even while power-hungry politicians pursued xenophobic and anti-immigrant platforms for personal gain. Illuminating democracy as a fragile enterprise that must be continually invented and reinvented, I Give You Half the Road emphasizes the importance of connection, generosity, and forgiveness.
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cover of I Thought There Would Be More Wolves: Poems

I Thought There Would Be More Wolves

Poems

Sara Ryan

University of Alaska Press, 2021

After moving to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, poet Sara Ryan found herself immersed in the isolated spaces of the North: the cold places that never thawed, the bleak expanses of snow. These poems have teeth, bones, and blood—they clack and bruise and make loud sounds. They interrogate self-preservation, familial history, extinction, taxidermy, and animal and female bodies. In between these lines, in warm places where blood collects, animals stay hidden and hunted, a girl looks loneliness dead in the eye, and wolves come out of the woods to run across the frozen water of Lake Superior.
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cover of I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person Writing

I-Writing

The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person Writing

Karen Surman Paley

Southern Illinois University Press, 2001

In this ethnographic study of the teaching of writing, Karen Surman Paley reveals the social significance of first-person writing and the limitations of a popular taxonomy of composition studies. Paley looks critically at the way social constructionists have created an “Other” in the field of composition studies and named it “expressivist.”

Paley demonstrates the complexity of approaches to teaching writing through an ethnographic study of two composition faculty at Boston College, a programthat some would say is “expressivist.” She prompts her colleagues to consider how family experiences shape the way students feel about and treat people of races, religions, genders, and sexual preferences other than their own. Finally, she suggests to the field of composition that practitioners spend less time shoring up taxonomies of the field and more time sharing pedagogies.

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cover of IN THE PRESENCE OF AUDIENCE: THE SELF IN DIARIES AND FICTION

IN THE PRESENCE OF AUDIENCE

THE SELF IN DIARIES AND FICTION

Deborah Martinson

The Ohio State University Press, 2003

As a diary writer imagines shadow readers rifling diary pages, she tweaks images of the self, creating multiple readings of herself, fixed and unfixed. When the readers and potential readers are husbands and publishers, the writer maneuvers carefully in a world of men who are quick to judge and to take offense. She fills the pages with reflections, anecdotes, codes, stories, biographies, and fictions. The diary acts as a site for the writer’s tension, rebellion, and remaking of herself.

In this book Martinson examines the diaries of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Violet Hunt, and Doris Lessing’s fictional character Anna Wulf, and shows that these diaries (and others like them) are not entirely private writings as has been previously assumed. Rather, their authors wrote them knowing they would be read. In these four cases, the audience is the author’s male lover or husband, and Martinson reveals how knowledge of this audience affects the language and content in each diary. Ultimately, she argues, this audience enforces a certain “male censorship” which changes the shape of the revelations, the shape of the writer herself, making it impossible for the female author to be honest in writing about her true self.

Even sophisticated readers often assume that diaries are primarily private. This study interrogates the myth of authenticity and self-revelation in diaries written under the gaze of particular peekers.

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cover of If at First You Don't Succeed?: Writing, Rhetoric, and the Question of Failure

If at First You Don't Succeed?

Writing, Rhetoric, and the Question of Failure

Steven J. Corbett

University Press of Colorado, 2025

What does it mean to fail at an important performance, to be a failure, or to fail someone at something? Failure is a universal concept widely applicable to every aspect of writing studies. Perhaps it is the most universal concept applicable to writing studies (or life, for that matter). But what it means to fail can mean vastly different things to vastly different people at vastly different times. In this edited collection, 25 writing studies scholars use failure as a conceptual lens to reflect on their experiences as scholars and teachers. Their contributions address historical and theoretical treatments of failure, offer case studies of failure in teaching and research, and share brief (but bitter/sweet) narratives drawn from personal experiences in the field.
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cover of Immersion: A Writer's Guide to Going Deep

Immersion

A Writer's Guide to Going Deep

Ted Conover

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Over three and a half decades, Ted Conover has ridden the rails with hoboes, crossed the border with Mexican immigrants, guarded prisoners in Sing Sing, and inspected meat for the USDA. His books and articles chronicling these experiences, including the award-winning Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, have made him one of the premier practitioners of immersion reporting.

In immersion reporting—a literary cousin to ethnography, travel writing, and memoir—the writer fully steps into a new world or culture, participating in its trials, rites, and rituals as a member of the group. The end results of these firsthand experiences are familiar to us from bestsellers such as Nickel and Dimed and Behind the Beautiful Forevers. But in a world of wary strangers, where does one begin?

Conover distills decades of knowledge into an accessible resource aimed at writers of all levels. He covers how to “get into” a community, how to conduct oneself once inside, and how to shape and structure the stories that emerge. Conover is also forthright about the ethics and consequences of immersion reporting, preparing writers for the surprises that often surface when their piece becomes public. Throughout, Conover shares anecdotes from his own experiences as well as from other well-known writers in this genre, including Alex Kotlowitz, Anne Fadiman, and Sebastian Junger. It’s a deep-in-the-trenches book that all aspiring immersion writers should have in hand as they take that first leap into another world. 
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cover of Improvisations: Methods and Methodologies in Lifespan Writing Research

Improvisations

Methods and Methodologies in Lifespan Writing Research

Ryan J. Dippre

University Press of Colorado, 2025

Improvisations provides readers with insights and options as they develop new lifespan writing research projects or seek to re-orient existing projects to incorporate a lifespan lens. In Part 1 of this edited collection, contributors consider research methodologies that have been adapted to the particular demands of lifespan writing research, with each methodology given two chapters: one that outlines the process of taking up the methodology, and another that provides a detailed example of the methodology in action. In Part 2, contributors suggest new methodologies for lifespan writing research and highlight challenges that this line of inquiry presents as an ethical and socially conscious research agenda. These chapters, representing both established experts and new voices in writing, literacy, and education research, will be of use to graduate students and novice researchers, accomplished researchers pivoting to this area of study for the first time, and others who want to learn more about lifespan writing research.
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cover of Inclusive STEM: Transforming Disciplinary Writing Instruction for a Socially Just Future

Inclusive STEM

Transforming Disciplinary Writing Instruction for a Socially Just Future

Heather M. Falconer

University Press of Colorado, 2025

Encompassing a diversity of STEM education contexts, this edited collection offers instructional strategies and assignments for creating equitable, inclusive classrooms. With a focus on writing instruction, each chapter presents ways to create space for individuals and voices historically marginalized in STEM disciplines. Contributions move beyond typical disciplinary writing and content instruction and instead focus on work that is intentionally, sometimes subtly, disrupting the assumptions of STEM writing, communication, and knowledge-making. Contributors consider how we can create a sense of belonging for students from groups that have historically been kept out of these disciplines, how faculty can consciously create space for student voices to be heard, and how to do so with an eye toward the discursive practices of STEM disciplines. The chapters in Inclusive STEM offer specific cases—classroom- or research-based contexts—that describe their intents and goals, the interventions they enacted, how students responded, and the unexpected elements that presented themselves. These chapters also reveal the ugly bits: sharing lessons learned and errors made. The collection targets educators who teach disciplinary content, as well as writing in STEM.
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cover of Indexes: A Chapter from The Chicago Manual of Style

Indexes

A Chapter from The Chicago Manual of Style

The University of Chicago Press

University of Chicago Press, 1993

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cover of Indexes: A Chapter from The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition

Indexes

A Chapter from The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition

University of Chicago Press Staff

University of Chicago Press, 2003

For nearly one hundred years, The Chicago Manual of Style has been the authoritative reference for writers, editors, and publishers. Now in its fifteenth edition, the Manual has been thoroughly revised and updated. The chapter on indexing presented here has been reorganized, streamlined, and revised for the electronic age. It provides examples and recommendations on style and method for professionals, authors, and others who prepare indexes for published works.
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cover of Indigenous Graphic Communication Systems: A Theoretical Approach

Indigenous Graphic Communication Systems

A Theoretical Approach

Katarzyna Mikulksa

University Press of Colorado, 2025

Indigenous Graphic Communication Systems challenges the adequacy of Western academic views on what writing is and explores how they can be expanded by analyzing the sophisticated graphic communication systems found in Central Mesoamerica and Andean South America.
 
By examining case studies from across the Americas, the authors pursue an enhanced understanding of Native American graphic communication systems and how the study of graphic expression can provide insight into ancient cultures and societies, expressed in indigenous words. Focusing on examples from Central Mexico and the Andes, the authors explore the overlap among writing, graphic expression, and orality in indigenous societies, inviting reevaluation of the Western notion that writing exists only to record language (the spoken chain of speech) as well as accepted beliefs of Western alphabetized societies about the accuracy, durability, and unambiguous nature of their own alphabetized texts. The volume also addresses the rapidly growing field of semasiography and relocates it more productively as one of several underlying operating principles in graphic communication systems.
 
Indigenous Graphic Communication Systems reports new results and insights into the meaning of the rich and varied content of indigenous American graphic expression and culture as well as into the societies and cultures that produce them. It will be of great interest to Mesoamericanists, students, and scholars of anthropology, archaeology, art history, ancient writing systems, and comparative world history.
 
The research for and publication of this book have been supported in part by the National Science Centre of Poland (decision no. NCN-KR-0011/122/13) and the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

Contributors:
Angélica Baena Ramírez, Christiane Clados, Danièle Dehouve, Stanisław Iwaniszewski, Michel R. Oudijk, Katarzyna Szoblik, Loïc Vauzelle, Gordon Whittaker, Janusz Z. Wołoszyn, David Charles Wright-Carr
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cover of Indigenous Textual Cultures: Reading and Writing in the Age of Global Empire

Indigenous Textual Cultures

Reading and Writing in the Age of Global Empire

Tony Ballantyne, Lachy Paterson, and Angela Wanhalla, editors

Duke University Press, 2020

As modern European empires expanded, written language was critical to articulations of imperial authority and justifications of conquest. For imperial administrators and thinkers, the non-literacy of “native” societies demonstrated their primitiveness and inability to change. Yet as the contributors to Indigenous Textual Cultures make clear through cases from the Pacific Islands, Australasia, North America, and Africa, indigenous communities were highly adaptive and created novel, dynamic literary practices that preserved indigenous knowledge traditions. The contributors illustrate how modern literacy operated alongside orality rather than replacing it. Reconstructing multiple traditions of indigenous literacy and textual production, the contributors focus attention on the often hidden, forgotten, neglected, and marginalized cultural innovators who read, wrote, and used texts in endlessly creative ways. This volume demonstrates how the work of these innovators played pivotal roles in reimagining indigenous epistemologies, challenging colonial domination, and envisioning radical new futures.

Contributors. Noelani Arista, Tony Ballantyne, Alban Bensa, Keith Thor Carlson, Evelyn Ellerman, Isabel Hofmeyr, Emma Hunter, Arini Loader, Adrian Muckle, Lachy Paterson, Laura Rademaker, Michael P. J. Reilly, Bruno Saura, Ivy T. Schweitzer, Angela Wanhalla
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cover of Indigenous Voices in Digital Spaces

Indigenous Voices in Digital Spaces

Cindy Tekobbe

Utah State University Press, 2024

Indigenous Voices in Digital Spaces applies Indigenous frameworks and epistemologies to online cultural movements through four case studies, including hashtags, memes, cryptocurrency, and digital artistry, and develops decolonizing practices for digital rhetoric, online identity work, and digital literacy practices.
 
Tekobbe’s methods for analyzing and understanding Indigenous knowledges online center Indigenous storytelling and “thick” (broad, deep, and complex) Indigenous meaning-making. Employing this thickness to interpret Indigenous knowledge ways resists the settler-colonial logics that tend to flatten complex Indigenous concepts into one-note representations of racial stereotypes. Native Americans’ use of social media and digital platforms to support social movements uniquely constructs Indigenous identities as living, producing, and culture-making people, which confronts the commonplace, one-dimensional narrative that Indigenous North Americans either live in isolation or are people of history resigned to the long-forgotten past. Tekobbe’s methods are applicable to additional online research to break through Western paradigms of oppositional critique, the colonial power matrix embedded in hierarchical and taxonomical classification systems, and participant objectification.
 
Indigenous Voices in Digital Spaces offers new methodological and epistemological opportunities to explore digital communities and technologies, problematizing conventional Western critique. This book is useful to instructors in Indigenous studies, internet studies, digital literacies, cultural studies, and communications, as well as Indigenous and internet studies researchers.
 
 
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cover of Innovative Approaches to Teaching Technical Communication

Innovative Approaches to Teaching Technical Communication

edited by Tracy Bridgeford, Karla Saari Kitalong, and Dickie Selfe

Utah State University Press, 2004

Programs in technical writing, technical communication, and/or professional communication have recently grown in enrollment as the demand among employers for formally prepared technical writers and editors has grown. In response, scholarly treatments of the subject and the teaching of technical writing are also burgeoning, and the body of research and theory being published in this field is many times larger and more accessible than it was even a decade ago.

Although many theoretical and disciplinary perspectives can potentially inform technical communication teaching, administration, and curriculum development, the actual influences on the field's canonical texts have traditionally come from a rather limited range of disciplines. Innovative Approaches to Teaching Technical Communication brings together a wide range of scholars/teachers to expand the existing canon.

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cover of Inside Academic Writing: Understanding Audience and Becoming Part of an Academic Community

Inside Academic Writing

Understanding Audience and Becoming Part of an Academic Community

Grace Canseco

University of Michigan Press, 2010

Inside Academic Writing is designed to prepare students in any academic discipline for graduate-level writing. The text situates students within their writing communities by prioritizing the steps of learning; students are directed to use common threads of academic writing across disciplines. The goal of Inside Academic Writing is to give students the opportunity to write for a variety of audiences and to develop the knowledge necessary to recognize how to write for different audiences and purposes.

Inside Academic Writing allows students to examine basic assumptions about writing before they learn specific strategies for targeting the audience or mapping the flow of information. Through the material in this textbook, students will create a portfolio of writings that includes a biographical statement and a research interest essay—important pieces of writing that are rarely taught in courses. Other types of writing featured are a summary, a problem-solution text, a comparative structure paper, and a commentary.

Other textbooks prepare students for graduate writing, but Inside Academic Writing was designed to bridge the gap between non-academic writing and the writing required within an academic community, with one’s peers, colleagues, and field experts. In addition, Inside Academic Writing offers guidance on writing materials for grants, fellowships, conferences, and publication.

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cover of Insiders, Outliers: Centering Adult Student Writers at an HBCU

Insiders, Outliers

Centering Adult Student Writers at an HBCU

Collie Fulford

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Winner of the 2026 Outstanding Book Award in the Monograph category from the Conference on College Composition and Communication 

Insiders, Outliers invites readers into the lives of adult HBCU students for whom college is one meaningful activity among many. Although adults over the age of twenty-four comprise a quarter of all undergraduates, they are institutionally segregated and only partially served by a US higher education system that remains organized around traditional-aged learners. Even as such students are regarded as a market for postsecondary institutions, they are routinely marginalized by institutional barriers. Students’ stories of their personal, professional, community, and academic writing experiences illuminate a critical need for more age-inclusive practices across academia. Their cases also offer new conceptual models of writing as an ethical and emotional practice that fuels changes for individuals and the people and institutions that they care about—including higher education. What adult students reveal about writing across their life domains has powerful implications for conceptualizing writing as a complex form of agency and for teaching writing across the curriculum.
 

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cover of Institutional Ethnography as Writing Studies Practice

Institutional Ethnography as Writing Studies Practice

Michelle LaFrance

University Press of Colorado, 2024

The editors and contributors to this collection offer insights into the use of institutional ethnography for three primary purposes: to investigate and interrogate the cultures of work that are of interest to writing studies researchers, to understand more deeply what constitutes this work, and to consider how work takes shape within institutional contexts. Building on prior conversations about institutional ethnography, critical ethnography, and the complexities of writing programs, the editors and chapter authors consider their application to sites of writing and writing instruction. In doing so, they reveal the power of material conditions, institutional and field-based values, and the cultures of writing to shape how people carry out their everyday work in writing programs and other venues in which writing plays a central role. The findings shared in this edited collection provide insights into how institutional ethnography as a form of inquiry can make important contributions to the fields’ many ongoing conversations about the nature of our work, labor, and other writing-related interests.
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cover of Institutional Ethnography: A Theory of Practice for Writing Studies Researchers

Institutional Ethnography

A Theory of Practice for Writing Studies Researchers

Michelle LaFrance

Utah State University Press, 2019

A form of critical ethnography introduced to the social sciences in the late 1990s, institutional ethnography uncovers how things happen within institutional sites, providing a new and flexible tool for the study of how “work” is co-constituted within sites of writing and writing instruction. The study of work and work processes reveals how institutional discourse, social relations, and norms of professional practice coordinate what people do across time and sites of writing. Adoption of IE offers finely grained understandings of how our participation in the work of writing, writing instruction, and sites of writing gives material face to the institutions that govern the social world.
 
In this book, Michelle LaFrance introduces the theories, rhetorical frames, and methods that ground and animate institutional ethnography. Three case studies illustrate key aspects of the methodology in action, tracing the work of writing assignment design in a linked gateway course, the ways annual reviews coordinate the work of faculty and writing center administrators and staff, and how the key term “information literacy” socially organizes teaching in a first-year English program. Through these explorations of the practice of ethnography within sites of writing and writing instruction, LaFrance shows that IE is a methodology keenly attuned to the material relations and conditions of work in twenty-first-century writing studies contexts, ideal for both practiced and novice ethnographers who seek to understand the actualities of social organization and lived experience in the sites they study.
 
Institutional Ethnography expands the field’s repertoire of research methodologies and offers the grounding necessary for work with the IE framework. It will be invaluable to writing researchers and  students and scholars of writing studies across the spectrum—composition and rhetoric, literacy studies, and education—as well as those working in fields such as sociology and cultural studies.
 
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cover of International Students in First-Year Writing: A Journey Through Socio-Academic Space

International Students in First-Year Writing

A Journey Through Socio-Academic Space

Megan M. Siczek

University of Michigan Press, 2018

The book explores the journey of 10 international students to better understand their experiences at a U.S. educational institution and how they constructed and revealed these experiences in this particular socio-academic space. The study features a series of three interviews during the semester that the participants were enrolled in a mainstream first-year writing course; their stories not only capture their experiences but reveal inspiring stories that “give voice” to students outside the dominant cultural and linguistic community.
 
This study raises questions about how to support international students:
  • In what ways can it inform our practices and policies relative to the internationalization of education and the development of global perspectives and competencies?
  • What does it reveal that could impact daily instruction of L2 writing, particularly when it comes to international students’ need to meet the expectations of “university-level writing” in U.S. institutions of higher education?
  • On an individual level, what can we learn from these students and about ourselves as a result of our interactions?
 
 
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cover of Internationalization of US Writing Programs

Internationalization of US Writing Programs

Shirley K Rose

Utah State University Press, 2018

The Internationalization of US Writing Programs illuminates the role writing programs and WPAs play in defining goals, curriculum, placement, assessment, faculty development, and instruction for international student populations. The volume offers multiple theoretical approaches to the work of writing programs and illustrates a wide range of well-planned writing program–based empirical research projects.

As of 2016, over 425,000 international students were enrolled as undergraduates in US colleges and universities, part of a decade-long trend of increasing numbers of international students coming to the United States for both undergraduate and graduate degrees. Writing program administrators and writing teachers across the country are beginning to recognize this changing demographic as a useful catalyst for change in writing programs, which are tasked with preparing all students, regardless of initial level of English proficiency, for academic and professional writing.

The Internationalization of US Writing Programs is the first collection to focus specifically on this crucial aspect of the roles and responsibilities of WPAs, who are leading efforts to provide all students on their campuses, regardless of nationality or first language, with competencies in writing that will serve them in the academy and beyond.

Contributors: Jonathan Benda, Michael Dedek, Christiane Donahue, Chris W. Gallagher, Kristi Girdharry, Tarez Samra Graban, Jennifer E. Haan, Paula Harrington, Yu-Kyung Kang, Neal Lerner, David S. Martins, Paul Kei Matsuda, Heidi A. McKee, Libby Miles, Susan Miller-Cochran, Matt Noonan, Katherine Daily O’Meara, Carolina Pelaez-Morales, Stacey Sheriff, Gail Shuck, Christine M. Tardy, Stanley Van Horn, Daniel Wilber, Margaret Willard-Traub

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cover of Interrogating Gendered Pathologies

Interrogating Gendered Pathologies

Erin A. Clark

Utah State University Press, 2020

Interrogating Gendered Pathologies points out and critiques unjust patterns of pathology. Erin A. Frost and Michelle F. Eble assemble a transdisciplinary approach from/to technologies, rhetorics, philosophies, epistemologies, and biomedical data to consider the effects of biomedicine’s gendered norms on people’s lives. Using a range of complementary and intersectional theoretical approaches, contributors ask questions about rhetoric’s role in healthcare and how it differs depending on patient embodiment and the ways nonnormative bodies are pathologized.
 
These chapters engage common narratives about the ways in which gender in healthcare is secondary and highlights the stories of people who have battled to prioritize their own bodies through extraordinary difficulties. Employing a multiplicity of voices, the book represents a number of different perspectives on what it might look like to return health and medical data to embodied experience, to consider the effects of gendered and intersectional biomedical norms on lived realities, and to subvert the power of institutions in ways that move us toward biomedical justice.
 
This collection contributes to the burgeoning field of health and medical rhetorics by rhetorically and theoretically intervening in what are often seen as objective and neutral decisions related to the body and to scientific and medical data about bodies. Interrogating Gendered Pathologies will be of interest to feminist scholars in the field of rhetoric and writing studies, specifically those in the rhetorics of health and medicine, as well as scholars of technical communication, feminist studies, gender studies, technoscience studies, and bioethics.
 
Contributors: Leslie Anglesey, Mary Assad, Beth Boser, Lillian Campbell, Marleah Dean, Lori Beth De Hertogh, Leandra Hernandez, Elizabeth Horn-Walker, Caitlin Leach, Jordan Liz, Miriam Mara, Cathryn Molloy, Kerri Morris, Maria Novotny, Sage Perdue, Colleen Reilly
 
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cover of Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru

Into the Archive

Writing and Power in Colonial Peru

Kathryn Burns

Duke University Press, 2010

Writing has long been linked to power. For early modern people on both sides of the Atlantic, writing was also the province of notaries, men trained to cast other people’s words in official forms and make them legally true. Thus the first thing Columbus did on American shores in October 1492 was have a notary record his claim of territorial possession. It was the written, notarial word—backed by all the power of Castilian enforcement—that first constituted Spanish American empire. Even so, the Spaniards who invaded America in 1492 were not fond of their notaries, who had a dismal reputation for falsehood and greed. Yet Spaniards could not do without these men. Contemporary scholars also rely on the vast paper trail left by notaries to make sense of the Latin American past. How then to approach the question of notarial truth?

Kathryn Burns argues that the archive itself must be historicized. Using the case of colonial Cuzco, she examines the practices that shaped document-making. Notaries were businessmen, selling clients a product that conformed to local “custom” as well as Spanish templates. Clients, for their part, were knowledgeable consumers, with strategies of their own for getting what they wanted. In this inside story of the early modern archive, Burns offers a wealth of possibilities for seeing sources in fresh perspective.

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cover of Invention as a Social Act

Invention as a Social Act

Karen Burke LevFevre. Foreword by Frank D'Angelo

Southern Illinois University Press, 1986

The act of inventing relates to the process of inquiry, to creativity, to poetic and aesthetic invention.

Building on the work of rhetoricians, philosophers, linguists, and theorists in other dis­ciplines, Karen Burke LeFevre challenges a widely-held view of rhetorical invention as the act of an atomistic individual. She proposes that invention be viewed as a social act, in which individuals in­teract dialectically with society and culture in dis­tinctive ways.

Even when the primary agent of invention is an individual, invention is pervasively affected by rela­tionships of that individual to others through lan­guage and other socially shared symbol systems. LeFevre draws implications of a view of invention as a social act for writers, researchers, and teachers of writing.

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cover of Invention, Copyright, and Digital Writing

Invention, Copyright, and Digital Writing

Martine Courant Rife

Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

This is the first empirical, mixed-methods study of copyright issues that speaks to writing specialists and legal scholars about the complicated intersections of rhetoric, technology, copyright law, and writing for the Internet. Martine Courant Rife opens up new conversations about how invention and copyright work together in the composing process for  digital writers and how this relationship is central to contemporary issues in composition pedagogy and curriculum.

In this era of digital writing and publishing, composition and legal scholars have identified various problems with writers’ processes and the law’s construction of textual ownership, such as issues of appropriation, infringement, and fair use within academic and online contexts. Invention, Copyright, and Digital Writing unpacks digital writers’ complex perceptions of copyright, revealing how it influences what they choose to write and how it complicates their work. Rife uses quantitative and qualitative approaches and focuses on writing as a tool and a technology-mediated activity, arguing the copyright problem is about not law but invention and the attendant issues of authorship.

Looking at copyright and writing through a rhetorical lens, Rife leverages the tools and history of rhetoric to offer insights into how some of our most ancient concepts inform our understanding of the problems copyright law creates for writers. In this innovative study that will be of interest to professional and technical writers, scholars and students of writing and rhetoric, and legal professionals, Rife offers possibilities for future research, teaching, curriculum design, and public advocacy in regard to composition and changing copyright laws.

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cover of Isherwood on Writing: The Complete Lectures in California

Isherwood on Writing

The Complete Lectures in California

Christopher Isherwood

University of Minnesota Press, 2022

Isherwood’s lectures on writing and writers, now all available for the first time

In the 1960s, Christopher Isherwood gave an unprecedented series of lectures at California universities about his life and work. During this time Isherwood, who would liberate the memoir and become the founding father of modern gay writing, spoke openly for the first time about his craft—on writing for film, theater, and novels—and spirituality. Isherwood on Writing brings these free-flowing, wide-ranging public addresses together to reveal a distinctly American Isherwood at the top of his form.

This updated edition contains the long-lost conclusion to the second lecture, published here for the first time, including its discussion of A Single Man, his greatest novel, and A Meeting by the River, his final novel.

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cover of It Starts with Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing

It Starts with Trouble

William Goyen and the Life of Writing

By Clark Davis

University of Texas Press, 2015

William Goyen was a writer of startling originality and deep artistic commitment whose work attracted an international audience and the praise of such luminaries as Northrop Frye, Truman Capote, Gaston Bachelard, and Joyce Carol Oates. His subject was the land and language of his native East Texas; his desire, to preserve the narrative music through which he came to know his world. Goyen sought to transform the cherished details of his lost boyhood landscape into lasting, mythic forms. Cut off from his native soil and considering himself an “orphan,” Goyen brought modernist alienation and experimentation to Texas materials. The result was a body of work both sophisticated and handmade—and a voice at once inimitable and unmistakable.

It Starts with Trouble is the first complete account of Goyen’s life and work. It uncovers the sources of his personal and artistic development, from his early years in Trinity, Texas, through his adolescence and college experience in Houston; his Navy service during World War II; and the subsequent growth of his writing career, which saw the publication of five novels, including The House of Breath, nonfiction works such as A Book of Jesus, several short story collections and plays, and a book of poetry. It explores Goyen’s relationships with such legendary figures as Frieda Lawrence, Katherine Anne Porter, Stephen Spender, Anaïs Nin, and Carson McCullers. No other twentieth-century writer attempted so intimate a connection with his readers, and no other writer of his era worked so passionately to recover the spiritual in an age of disabling irony. Goyen’s life and work are a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling and the absolute necessity of narrative art.

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