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Adequate: Rewriting the Logics of Success in Rhetoric and Composition proposes a fresh approach to teaching rhetoric and composition—a field awash with unrealistic labor expectations and untenable and often unattainable requirements for both the educator and the educated—that takes “success” and “failure” out of the equation and advocates for the concept of adequacy over that of perfection.
 
Fourteen essays from established scholars, ranging from deeply personal, to darkly humorous, to impassioned and blunt, offer theoretical and pragmatic resources for responding to unjust labor extraction and the discipline’s demands that teachers do it all. Drawing on an array of intellectual traditions including labor studies, feminist rhetoric, disability studies, Jewish rhetoric, and theories of writing program administrations, authors assert the reasonable position of being enough and thriving outside of work in the face of growing demands for professional excellence and even perfection.
 
Adequate reimagines what the concept of adequacy holds for the future of academic work. An invaluable resource for scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students in the rhetoric and composition field, this volume covers the realities of teaching rhetoric and composition in the modern college environment, as well as potential paths forward for educators in need of a better work-life balance.
 

This study develops a new interpretation of The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio’s masterpiece, which has found new popularity in the wake of COVID. Dino S. Cervigni offers an inclusive and novel reading of the collection, theorizing that the first ninety tales offer a parodic rewriting of the Christian Middle Age, while the last ten tales craft a reconstruction of society based on human and liberal principles such as generosity and sacrifice. 

Still relevant to this day, The Decameron offers a notable description of the bubonic plague of 1348 which devastated Western Europe—drawing striking parallels with the current global pandemic. Furthermore, Boccaccio’s concluding message applies to all of us in the present moment, plunged as we are into a world of intellectual and ethical chaos, exhorting us to practice forgiveness, compassion, tolerance, mutual acceptance, and generous open-mindedness. No other book on The Decameron offers such a relevant, up-to-date reading of the classic work.

The Chicano Movement, el movimiento, is known as the largest and most expansive civil rights and empowerment movement by Mexican Americans up to that time. It made Chicanos into major American political actors and laid the foundation for today’s Latino political power. Rewriting the Chicano Movement is a collection of powerful new essays on the Chicano Movement that expand and revise our understanding of the movement. These essays capture the commitment, courage, and perseverance of movement activists, both men and women, and their struggles to achieve the promises of American democracy.

The essays in this volume broaden traditional views of the Chicano Movement that are too narrow and monolithic. Instead, the contributors to this book highlight the role of women in the movement, the regional and ideological diversification of the movement, and the various cultural fronts in which the movement was active. Rewriting the Chicano Movement stresses that there was no single Chicano Movement but instead a composite of movements committed to the same goal of Chicano self-determination. Scholars, students, and community activists interested in the history of the Chicano Movement can best start by reading this book.

Contributors: Holly Barnet-Sanchez, Tim Drescher, Jesús Jesse Esparza, Patrick Fontes, Mario T. García, Tiffany Jasmín González, Ellen McCracken, Juan Pablo Mercado, Andrea Muñoz, Michael Anthony Turcios, Omar Valerio-Jiménez
 

In the eighteenth century, “technology” didn’t name a particular device or a process. It referred instead to written accounts of the mechanical arts, a now-obsolete category encompassing the wide range of work done by hand, from baking bread to building ships. Rewriting the Mechanic examines how these written descriptions, circulating across genres in eighteenth-century Britain, transformed certain mechanical arts by imagining them as newly innovative, authoritative, and able to make speculative possibilities real—as what we now call technological. Reversing the familiar story in which literature simply reflects technological change, West draws on the work of Robert Hooke, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen to demonstrate the influence of literary techniques on ideas about masculinity, power, and the body, and how these texts helped to bring the very idea of technological modernity into being.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Innovative poetry, philosophy, theology and new sciences converge in the project of rewriting the word “God”

In Rewriting the Word “God,” Romana Huk examines the substantive connections between innovative poetry of the last century and contemporary theology and philosophy. Along the way, we encounter ten poets who have, without abandoning their inherited or chosen faith traditions, radically rethought conceptualizations of divinity, human ontology, and the real.

From the startlingly proto-phenomenological encounters with nature by Gerard Manley Hopkins to the post-deconstructive pursuit of “oracular” speech in Fanny Howe, these poets have found inspiration in a wide range of sources, from ancient religious texts to modern philosophical movements. But what unites them is their willingness to continually change, experiment and challenge the status quo, both in their religious beliefs and their poetic practice.

Huk shows how these poets have used their work to explore ultimate questions of life and death, meaning and purpose, and the relationship between humans and materiality, humans and other humans, which for these poets sheds light on humanity’s relationship with the divine. She also highlights the ways in which they have engaged with social and political issues in their poetry to speak out against injustice and oppression.

Rewriting the Word “God” is a thought-provoking and inspiring work that will challenge current perceptions of both religion and poetry from new positions at the intersection of faith, art, philosophy, science, literary theory, and culture.

"Like all writers, intellectuals need to say something new and say it well. But unlike many other writers, what intellectuals have to say is bound up with the books we are reading . . . and the ideas of the people we are talking with."

What are the moves that an academic writer makes? How does writing as an intellectual change the way we work from sources? In Rewriting, a textbook for the undergraduate classroom, Joseph Harris draws the college writing student away from static ideas of thesis, support, and structure, and toward a more mature and dynamic understanding. Harris wants college writers to think of intellectual writing as an adaptive and social activity, and he offers them a clear set of strategies—a set of moves—for participating in it.

The first comprehensive study of its kind, this book explores the contradictory connections between women and dramatic comedy. Women and Comedy shows how a genre that has been used historically to restrict women's behavior is being reconfigured to express women's triumphs. It thus redefines the assumptions with which both traditional comedy and contemporary women's plays are read and viewed. Challenging a critical consensus that has seen comedy as a haven for female power, Carlson argues that traditional comedy is deeply sexist, welcoming strong women characters only because it can contain their power. Through an analysis of a range of comedies by Shakespeare, Congreve, Maugham, Shaw, and Ayckbourn, the author shows that even in these plays self-consciously about liberated females, women gain only a limited freedom, a freedom that the endings of the plays work to negate. This negotiation is seen to result in part from the comic structure itself, which privileges a merely temporary inversion and an ultimate return to the status quo. Carlson then examines the transitional work of three writers – Aphra Behn, Henry James, and Ann Jellicoe – whose heroines follow an unorthodox trajectory through their comic worlds. While the work of these writers clearly remains within the mainstream comic tradition, the author notes in them a subtle departure, most notably in their description of the heroine as subject rather than object, which prefigures the full-scale transformations of women in comedy by contemporary women writers.   The book then examines contemporary comedy that revises traditional comic structure at the same time as it explores fundamental social change. In making her case for the difference of contemporary comedy by women, Carlson examines the reformulations of structure and character and considers issues of community, self, and sexuality in a broad range of plays by individual playwrights and by the new women's theater collectives.  Women and Comedy is an important work for students of British drama and will appeal to theater practitioners, critics, feminist scholars, and all those interested in the performing arts.