Kategoria BISAC: Language Arts & Disciplines >> Rhetoric

The twenty-three selections in this volume are essays, research studies, and personal narratives by the "silent majority" in composition studies: teachers and researchers with viewpoints that Sheryl I. Fontaine and Susan Hunter note are often voiced in private conversations but seldom printed in scholarly journals or aired at professional conferences.

Rather than focusing on the traditional categories of pedagogy and research, Fontaine and Hunter organize the essays into four sections: the invisible pedagogue of the discipline, the model of power that dominates composition, the...

Concerned with criticizing representational theories of knowledge by developing alternative concepts of knowing and communicating, Ian Angus and Lenore Langsdorf bring together eight essays that are united by a common theme: the convergence of philosophy and rhetoric.

In the first chapter, Angus and Langsdorf illustrate the centrality of critical reasoning to the nature of questioning itself, arguing that human inquiry has entered a"new situation" where "the convictions and orientations that have traditionally marked the separation of rhetoric and philosophythe concern for truth and the...

Donnalee Rubin examines the responses of thirty-one freshman composition teachers to student writing and shows the negative effects of gender bias on assessment to prove that gender perceptions and expectations can influence assessment decisions that seem neutral on the surface. Arguing that certain pedagogies are more likely to minimize gender bias than others, Rubin believes that teachers are more likely to overcome the influence of gender bias on their teaching if they adopt a process-based method and work intimately with their students through nondirective, supportive...

"Women Writing the Academy "is based on an extensive interview study by Gesa E. Kirsch that investigates how women in different academic disciplines perceive and describe their experiences as writers in the university.

Kirsch s study focuses on the writing strategies of successful women writers, their ways of establishing authority, and the kinds of audiences they address in different disciplinary settings. Based on multiple interviews with thirty-five women from five different disciplines (anthropology, education, history, nursing, and psychology) and four academic ranks (seniors,...

Despite its pervasiveness and its significance, composition has an unstable status within the curriculum. Writing programs and writing faculty are besieged by academic, political, and financial concerns that have not been well understood or addressed.

At many institutions, composition functions paradoxically as both the gateway to academic success and as the gatekeeper, reducing access to academic work and opportunity for those with...

Arguing for an oral theory of Reader Response Criticism, Steven B. Katz conducts a philosophical investigation into the possibility and desirability of teaching reading and writing as rhetorical music.

In the course of this investigation, Katz deals with New Physics, the sophists, Cicero, orality, epistemology, voice, writing, temporality, and sound. He demonstrates that Reader Response Criticismas part of a new sophistic that has entered the mainstream of pedagogy and practice in our cultureparallels the philosophy of science engendered by the Copenhagen school of New Physics, which...

This is the first book-length study of the status of composition in English studies and the uneasy relationship between composition and literature. Composition studies and institutional histories of English studies have long needed this kind of clarification of the historical and political contexts of composition teaching, research, and administration.

Susan Miller argues that composition constitutes a major national industry, citing the four million freshman-level students enrolled in such courses each year, the $40 million annual expenditure for textbooks, and the more than $50 million...

Susan Peck MacDonald here tackles important and often controversial contemporary questions regarding the rhetoric of inquiry, the social construction of knowledge, and the professionalization of the academy. MacDonald argues that the academy has devoted more effort to analyzing theory and method than to analyzing its own texts. Professional texts need further attention because they not only create but are also shaped by the knowledge that is special to each discipline. Her assumption is that knowledge making is the distinctive activity of the academy at the professional level; for that...

In this book, Jasper Neel s sure-to-be-controversial resituating of Aristotle centers around three questions that have been constants in his twenty-two years of teaching experience: What does it mean to teach writing? What should one know "before "teaching writing? And, if there is such a thing as "research in the teaching of writing," what is it?

Believing that all composition teachers are situated politically and socially, both as part of the institution in which they teach and as beings with lived histories, Neel examines his own life and the life of composition studies as a...

It has long been recognized that affect (that is, the noncognitive aspect of mental activity) plays a large role in writing and in learning to write. According to Susan H. McLeod, however, the model that has been most used for empirical research on the writing process is based on cognitive psychology and does not take into account affective phenomena. Nor does the social constructionist view of the writing process acknowledge the affective realm except in a very general way. To understand the complete picture, McLeod insists, we need to explore how cognitive, affective, and social elements...

To understand the history of "English," Ross Winterowd insists, one must understand how literary studies, composition-rhetoric studies, and influential textbooks interrelate. Stressing the interrelationship among these three forces, Winterowd presents a history of English studies in the university since the Enlightenment.

Winterowd s history is unique in three ways. First, it tells the whole story of English studies: it does not separate the history of literary studies from that of composition-rhetoric studies, nor can it if it is going to be an authentic history. Second, it traces the...

Craig Waddell presents essays investigating Rachel Carson s influential 1962 book, "Silent Spring." In his foreword, Paul Brooks, Carson s editor at Houghton Mifflin, describes the process that resulted in "Silent Spring." In an afterword, Linda Lear, Carson s recent biographer, recalls the end of Carson s life and outlines the attention that Carson s book and Carson herself received from scholars and biographers, attention that focused so minutely on her life that it detracted from a focus on her work. The foreword by Brooks and the afterword by Lear frame this exploration within the...

Breaking with the still-dominant process tradition in composition studies, post-process theoryor at least the different incarnations of post-process theory discussed by the contributors represented in this collection of original essaysendorses the fundamental idea that no codifiable or generalizable writing process exists or could exist. Post-process theorists hold that the practice of writing cannot be captured by a generalized process or a "big" theory.

Most post-process theorists hold three assumptions about the act of writing: writing is public; writing is interpretive; and writing...

This study by Phillip Eubanks challenges traditional accounts of metaphor and significantly expands theories of "conceptual" metaphor by examining Trade Is War metaphor as it occurs in concrete discourse.

Although scholarly interest in metaphor as an aesthetic, linguistic, and cognitive phenomenon has long endured, Eubanks is among the first to consider metaphor in its sociohistorical role. Questioning major accounts of metaphor from Aristotle to the present, Eubanks argues that metaphor is not just influenced by but actually is "constituted" by its concrete operation.

Far-reaching in...