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Nick Tingle investigates the psychoanalytic dimensions of composition instruction in Self-Development and College Writing to boldly illustrate that mastering academic prose requires students to develop psychologically as well as cognitively. Asserting that writing instruction should be an engaging, developmental process for both teachers and students, he urges reaching for new levels of consciousness in the classroom to aid students in realigning their subjective relationships with knowledge and truth.

Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and twenty years of experience as a teacher, Tingle outlines the importance of moving beyond usual ways of thinking, abandoning the common sense of everyday reality, and coming to understand beliefs as beliefs and not absolutes. These developmental moves must be accompanied, Tingle says, by a new attitude towards language—not as something that points to things, but as a series of concepts that arrange the very things one points to. And this development is necessary not just in order to perform well in the writing class, but also to fully participate in and reap the academic rewards of structured, university life.

Self-Development and College Writing calls attention to the psychological destabilization this method may produce for students. Tingle explains that, if writing instructors are to respond to this destabilization, they must conceive of the classroom as a transitional space, or a kind of holding environment. They must also become aware of their psychological allegiances to particular theories of writing if they are to construct such environments.

But the goal of the transitional environment is worth pursuing, Tingle argues, contending that university education fails to address students’ developmental needs. With purposeful writing and deft analyses, Tingle shows that this goal also affords a means by which to place writing courses at the center of the educational curriculum. Conceived as a transitional space, the writing class may support and stabilize students in their developmental passage, thereby fostering an improved understanding of their academic work and, more importantly, an increased intellectual understanding of themselves and the complex world in which they live.

Applying the complexities of literacy development and personal ethos to the teaching of composition, Zan Meyer Goncalves challenges writing teachers to consider ethos as a series of identity performances shaped by the often-inequitable social contexts of their classrooms and communities. Using the rhetorical experiences of students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender, she proposes a new way of thinking about ethos that addresses the challenges of social justice, identity, and transfer issues in the classroom.

Goncalves offers an innovative approach to teaching identity performance theory bound by social contexts. She applies this new approach to theories of specificity and intersectionality, illustrating how teachers can help students redefine the relationship between their social identities and their writing. She also addresses bringing social activism and identity politics into the classroom, helping writers make transfers across rhetorical contexts and linking students' interests to public conversations.

Theoretical and practical, Sexuality and the Politics of Ethos in the Writing Classroom provides teachers of first-year and advanced composition studies with useful, detailed assignments based in specific identity performance. Goncalves offers techniques to subvert oppressive language practices, while encouraging students to recognize themselves as writers, citizens, and active participants in their own educations and communities.

Serves both as a script for performance and as a text for high school and college theater and English classes.

This self-contained script brings together different scenes from Shake­speare’s plays to portray women “in all their infinite variety.” Two narrators, a man and a woman, introduce and com­ment on these scenes, weaving together the different characters and situations.

This book combines literary and theat­rical techniques in examining Shake­speare’s women. Its promptbook format provides clear, helpful stage directions on pages facing each of the scenes. Also help­ful are concise glosses and footnotes to define difficult words and phrases plus a commentary to explain each scene in its dramatic context.

Other features include sheet music for each song in the play, a bibliography on the topic of women in Shakespeare’s plays, and suggestions for directors who wish to stage the play.

In Shaping Language Policy in the U.S.: The Role of Composition Studies, author Scott Wible explores the significance and application of two of the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s key language policy statements: the 1974 Students’ Right to Their Own Language resolution and the 1988 National Language Policy. Wible draws from a wealth of previously unavailable archived material and professional literature to offer for the first time a comprehensive examination of these policies and their legacies that continue to shape the worlds of rhetoric, politics, and composition.

Wible demonstrates the continued relevance of the CCCC’s policies, particularly their role in influencing the recent, post-9/11 emergence of a national security language policy. He discusses in depth the role the CCCC’s language policy statements can play in shaping the U.S. government’s growing awareness of the importance of foreign language education, and he offers practical discussions of the policies’ pedagogical, professional, and political implications for rhetoric and composition scholars who engage contemporary debates about the politics of linguistic diversity and language arts education in the United States. Shaping Language Policy in the U.S. reveals the numerous ways in which the CCCC language policies have usefully informed educators’ professional practices and public service and investigates how these policies can continue to guide scholars and teachers in the future.

 

In Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts,editors Cheryl Glenn and Krista Ratcliffe bring together seventeen essays by new and established scholars that demonstrate the value and importance of silence and listening to the study and practice of rhetoric. Building on the editors’ groundbreaking research, which respects the power of the spoken word while challenging the marginalized status of silence and listening, this volumemakes a strong case for placing these overlooked concepts, and their intersections, at the forefront of rhetorical arts within rhetoric and composition studies.

            Divided into three parts—History, Theory and Criticism, and Praxes—this book reimagines traditional histories and theories of rhetoric and incorporates contemporary interests, such as race, gender, and cross-cultural concerns, into scholarly conversations about rhetorical history, theory, criticism, and praxes. For the editors and the other contributors to this volume, silence is not simply the absence of sound and listening is not a passive act. When used strategically and with purpose—together and separately—silence and listening are powerful rhetorical devices integral to effective communication. The essays cover a wide range of subjects, including women rhetors from ancient Greece and medieval and Renaissance Europe; African philosophy and African American rhetoric; contemporary antiwar protests in the United States; activist conflict resolution in Israel and Palestine; and feminist and second-language pedagogies.  

            Taken together, the essays in this volume advance the argument that silence and listening are as important to rhetoric and composition studies as the more traditionally emphasized arts of reading, writing, and speaking and are particularly effective for theorizing, historicizing, analyzing, and teaching. An extremely valuable resource for instructors and students in rhetoric, composition, and communication studies, Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts will also have applications beyond academia, helping individuals, cultural groups, and nations more productively discern and implement appropriate actions when all parties agree to engage in rhetorical situations that include not only respectful speaking, reading, and writing but also productive silence and rhetorical listening.     

Responding to a growing pedagogical paralysis in debates over the nature and status of composition studies as an academic discipline, Lisa Ede offers a provocative inquiry into the politics of composition’s place in the academy. The result is a timely and engaging reflection on the rhetoric, ideology, and ethics of scholarship and instruction in composition studies today.

Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location delves into some of the most vexing issues presently facing the field: its status in relation to English studies, the nature and consequences of the writing process movement, the uneven professionalization of composition teachers, and the widening chasm between theory and practice. Ede interrogates key moments and texts in composition’s evolution, from the writing process movement to Susan Miller’s Textual Carnivals, through the interpretive lenses of historical analysis, theoretical critique, feminist and cultural theory, and Ede’s own two decades of experiences as a teacher and writing program administrator.

Questioning the narratives of progress and paradigm shifts that inform the field’s highly regarded recent theoretical studies, Ede urges scholars to carefully reconsider these claims, to honor the roles of teachers and students as more than dupes of ideology, and to more fully acknowledge—and utilize—the differences between the practice of theory and the practice of teaching. As academic hierarchies of knowledge increasingly privilege scholarship over instruction, Ede warns researchers to be cognizant of the politics and power inherent in their own location in the academy, particularly when professing to speak for teachers and students. To that end, the volume’s conclusion advocates pragmatic avenues for change and proffers topics for future discussion and debate.

Taking the position that style has a value in its own right, that language forms a major component of the story a nonfiction writer has to tell, Anderson analyzes the work of America’s foremost practitioners of New Journalism—Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Joan Didion.

Anderson does for nonfiction what insightful critics have long been doing for fiction and poetry. His approach is rhetorical, and his message is that the rhetoric of Wolfe, Capote, Mailer, and Didion is a direct response to the problem of trying to convey to a general audience the sublime, inexplicable, or private and intuitive experiences that conventional rhetoric cannot evoke.

The emphasis in this book is on style, not genre, and the analysis characterizes the distinctive styles of four American writers, showing how the richness and complexity of their prose discloses an important argument about the value of language itself. Their prose is complex, nuanced, layered, affecting, always aware of itself as style. This self-consciousness, Anderson contends, prepares the reader to regard style as argument, a “tacit but powerful statement about the value of form as form, style as style.”