Search

Describes the author's personal family struggle with entering the field of English. Notes how it is becoming increasingly difficult for today's students to be able to make choices among instrumentalist and intellectual paradigms of education and work. Concludes by voicing a hope that educators can invent new rules for "academic" writing in this new century. (SG)

This essay considers how a male evangelical Christian in a first-year writing (FYW) course at a state university negotiates his identity in his academic writing for a non-Christian audience. It focuses on how "Austin" casuistically stretches a biblical text to accommodate his audience's pluralistic perspective. Austin's writing thus provides a discursive window into how writing academically for an FYW course might nudge students from dualism toward pluralism. It thus prompts compositionists not only to interrogate how writing academically may implicate students' most deeply held beliefs, but also to make such identity consequences explicit to students. (Contains 2 notes.)

Although the phrase "college and career readiness" has been in circulation since the mid-2000s, it has become nearly ubiquitous in discussions about K-12 and postsecondary education, especially in the last two years. In spring 2010 an unprecedented collaboration led to the development of the "Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing," an effort by three organizations committed to literacy development--the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the National Writing Project (NWP)--to become a part of these discussions. Realizing together that the voices of educators at all levels were often absent from these conversations, the three created a single task force with representation from each group to "develop a framework that will articulate the experiences, knowledge, and habits of mind that students need to succeed as they begin the first year of college writing." Key to this work were both the nature of the collaboration and the underlying beliefs that are part of each group's ethos. This symposium centers on the recently released "Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing." In addition to the document itself, the symposium features an introduction to it by some of its drafters, as well as responses to it by veteran composition specialists.

Recently, several composition scholars have engaged in apocalyptic rhetoric, although they distance themselves from versions of it that advocate critical pedagogy. Bruno Latour's theories help expose such pedagogy's limitations while also offering a perspective on teacher-student relationships that can more realistically and sensitively work toward allaying potential disaster. Latour's work is particularly apt for the apocalyptic moment in composition. Since at least "We Have Never Been Modern" (English trans. 1993), Latour has made it his project to think otherwise than (not to say "outside of") the logic of Plato's cave. Latour's work also offers a post-critical take on thinking and writing about matters of public concern. The author argues that Latour's writing can help individuals articulate a way to move composition past the apocalyptic logic of critique and closer to an apocalyptic turn toward responsibility. (Contains 10 notes.)

From September 2008 to July 2009, the author traded academic robes for the Army Combat Uniform issued to US Navy personnel deploying to Afghanistan. Along with using the ceramic and Kevlar body armor he learned to don at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, he metaphorically defended himself from the disruption to his personal and professional life that would result from this mobilization by calling it a fully funded overseas federal fellowship. In this article, the author explains how his military service in Afghanistan left him having to reconsider his identity as a scholarly writer. (Contains 9 notes.)

Objects are rich sources of inquiry; they invite individuals to observe closely, pose questions, forge connections, and anchor ideas in the concrete. By examining a son's craft project, a family photograph, and an image of tectonic plates, the authors demonstrate how objects can elicit rhetorical invention. While this venture started as a writing experiment (some might claim a self-indulgent one), the activity itself and resulting pieces raise larger questions about the nature of writing and the assignments the authors give to their students. Conventional wisdom casts composition as meeting rhetorical situations or extending delineated subject matters or scholarly traditions. Their approach flouted that convention by identifying objects first, then seeing what they could make of them. The authors found that beginning with evocative objects rather than with, for example, a problem or issue indeed provoked observations and feelings, associations and questions they likely would not have produced through other means. They propose their modest method as at least an occasional practice in composition scholarship and in composition classrooms. (Contains 16 figures and 5 notes.)

Recent theoretical and technological developments, including concepts of networking elaborated by Bruno Latour, enable composition studies to take an empiricist turn toward issues of identity. More specifically, these developments help the field more strongly connect the figure of the writing-subject to the experiences of actual writers. In this article, the author proposes a retheorized discourse of identity. He argues that identity names an aspect of the idea of traffic between textuality and the "outside" of textuality, the aspect with which composition studies historically is most concerned: agency.

The contemporary university's reliance on coursepacks, whether they take print or digital form, is illuminated by Bruno Latour's theories and by consideration of a nineteenth-century copyright case involving noted textbook author William McGuffey. In particular, these contexts remind individuals that coursepacks are situated within shifting constellations of material things. In this essay, the author talks about translucency, coursepacks, and the post-historical university. This essay interrogates an educators' ontological assumptions about what coursepacks mean in the institutions in which they live and work. The author employs ontological as an understanding of things in the world and how they exist. He offers a historical thing-reading that attempts to "pick up" and "turn over" the strange translucent coursepack, bringing it into the light for all to see. (Contains 3 figures and 8 notes.)

It is hard to think of a writer whose work has been more prominently upheld as an example of bad academic writing than the philosopher and literary theorist Judith Butler. In 1998, Butler was awarded first prize in the annual Bad Writing Contest established by the journal "Philosophy and Literature," and early in 1999, was lampooned in an editorial in the "Wall Street Journal" by Denis Dutton, one of the chief architects of the contest. Quoting Butler's award-winning sentence, Dutton claimed that Butler's "inept," "jargon-laden" prose was typical of the obscurantist writing being admired and emulated in the most elite circles of today's academic humanities. In 1999, the same year Dutton took Butler to task in the "Wall Street Journal," the feminist moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum published a harsh, widely cited critique of Butler in the "New Republic," claiming that Butler's "ponderous and obscure" writing, like that of other postmodern feminists, breaks with the normal communicative practices that characterize "both the continental and Anglo-American philosophical traditions." Surprisingly, then, many who defend Butler's writing and the type of theoretical discourse it represents agree with Butler's critics that her writing is inaccessible when judged by normative standards of accessibility. While Dutton, Nussbaum, and others condemn Butler's alleged inaccessibility to mainstream readers, Butler and many of her allies praise that alleged inaccessibility on the grounds that it has the subversive potential to liberate those very same readers. But is Butler's writing really that inaccessible and unintelligible? Does her writing really depart from common standards and conventions of clarity? The author's own view is that, far from breaking from recognized standards of intelligibility, Butler's writing conforms to those standards in ways that are missed by both her detractors and most of her defenders, Butler included. Though Butler's writing certainly does have unclear moments, it would not have had the wide impact it has had were it not for its ability to consistently make recognizable arguments that readers can identify, summarize, and debate. Butler's writing has succeeded in circulating as widely as it has in academic circles and beyond not because it breaks with the traditional pattern of "trad[ing] arguments and counter-arguments," as Nussbaum insists, but precisely because it makes systematic use of this classic argumentative pattern, and does so in ways that all writers (and readers) can learn from. (Contains 3 notes.)

Stanley Fish in his new book ["Save the World on Your Own Time" (New York: Oxford UP,2008)] says that composition studies presents "the clearest example" of what is desperately wrong in the academy, because in writing classrooms, he says, "more often than not anthologies of provocative readings take center stage and the actual teaching of writing is shunted to the sidelines." Fish's thesis in this book is that academics have one job only: to teach the material of their disciplines, the disciplinary methods, and objects of study. Arguing against those academics who claim that their work as teachers will foster social justice, Fish characterizes them as making a much larger claim: that their work will "save the world." In this essay, Bizzell summarizes two of the ways in which she believes composition studies can indeed contribute to making the world a better place. One: by properly teaching writing, educators help students develop abilities that will help them succeed in and beyond college, especially valuable for purposes of social redress if the students come from marginalized groups. Two: while educators are doing this teaching, they can assign materials that raise issues of social justice and foster reflection on rhetorical methods of engaging them.

Drawing on students' literacy autobiographies, this article critiques the premise that academic discourse and working-class identity are not only static but also in complete opposition. The author argues for a more performative theory of class, a theory that would, she explains, recognize that academic discourse creates social class distinctions through processes that can be critiqued and reshaped.

The idea that "the personal is political" is both a commonplace in composition studies and something many have not yet fully theorized. The literature on personal writing tends to explore the relationship of the personal to academic discourse and the ethics and problems of intruding into students' lives. Because of this emphasis on the individual, some critics, such as James Berlin and Joel Haefner, suggest a dichotomy between personal writing and social critique, but such a position is undermined by some basic tenets of critical pedagogy, a strong influence on composition studies. Critical pedagogues do address the links between the personal and social critique but fail to fully explore a critical pedagogy tied to personal experience. This article examines the literacy narratives of Frederick Douglass's "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave" and Richard Wright's "Black Boy". According to the author, on the surface, Douglass's and Wright's narratives provide a simple celebration of literacy, however, a more complicated pattern emerges from the experiences of these men. Both men become obsessed with generative themes that help them create radical personal and social change--with reading and writing being central to their experiences.

After summarizing typical criticisms of multicultural composition readers, the author draws on work in "New Literacy Studies" to point toward composition pedagogies that encourage multicultural interactions beyond selections in assigned readers. The author suggests that what is ultimately needed is a productive critical frame not only for refining critical assessments of multicultural readers, but also for opening composition to "transcultural" understandings.

Provides a history of disciplinary discourse in English studies. Reveals that this new kind of writing--self-conscious, reflective prose--is creating a new "life form" in academic culture. Suggests that in order to recognize this culture, educators need to conduct research into the language academics use to define, describe, and change their work. (SG)

Establishes that there are different ways of conceiving of time and that they are class-based. Illustrates in part the history of one working-class student struggling to make sense of middle-class affiliations with academic discourse and middle-class understandings of time. Proposes that writing teachers make more explicit the ways that narrative and the more privileged genres of analysis and argument interanimate one another. (SG)

Presents an introduction to several articles in this issue that address the place of personal writing in professional contexts. Aims to clarify the myriad denotations of "the personal" in academic discourse and to suggest viable criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of personal writing's contributions to knowledge-making in English studies. (SG)

Reviews arguments both for and against the personal as/in academic writing, suggesting that even supporters of experiential writing generally fall short of establishing its argument-based role. Examines the advantages as well as the dangers of conjuring stories as evidence in order to argue for the necessity of establishing effective standards of judgment for narrative inquiry. (SG)

Presents a discussion of symposium participants' excitement as well as frustrations over the ways in which current work in composition and literacy studies has explored the politics of the personal. Offers an example of how personal writing can promote the material as well as the subversive authority of professional discourse. (SG)

Questions the rhetoric of reproof and asserts the authors' belief that the practice of scholarly critique is generally salutary. Hopes to stand as a testimony to the firm belief in the importance of critique in the ongoing scholarly conversation. Considers ethical problems with (and use of) the rhetoric of reproof, and ethical awareness and the scholarly conversation. (SC)

Questions whether literature should have a role in first-year composition courses. Argues that this question cannot be discussed without deciding on the objectives for such a course. Claims that first-year composition should eliminate the use of literature and focus on practicing the discourse of the academy. (HB)

Demonstrates several of the pitfalls inherent in traditional textbook definitions of the "formal essay" and academic discourse in the teaching of literary criticism. Suggests alternative approaches and assignments that make students aware of other ways to read and write about literature. (HB)

Offers a comparison of private epideictic rhetoric and scholarship as an object lesson for understanding what scholars (particularly those in English departments) do and why some critics in the popular media are reacting so negatively to it. Draws implications from the intrinsic nature of scholarly discourse. (RS)

Describes the overlooked ethical dimensions of academic writing. Offers a conceptual framework for examining and teaching the moral principles and ethical constraints entailed by academic research and writing. Suggests several reasons why academic writing should be viewed as a moral as well as a cognitive phenomenon. (HB)

Explores the conditions that have given rise to the current reliance on non-tenure-track employment and how the attempts to deal with these conditions on an ad hoc basis has resulted in a broad spectrum of temporary and part-time situations. (PRA)

Asserts that the problem of college instruction is how to put students in touch with a usable cultural past and how to help students attain an active relationship with their cultural present. Discusses the cultural role of canons and the definition of literary study. Explores the topics of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. (PRA)

Argues that questions implied by Writing across the Curriculum (WAC) have been muted to insulate the tenuous consensus on which WAC is built from the clash of powerful and professional ideological interests in the university. Includes discussion of British expressivism as curricular critique, and the U.S. retreat from institutional critique. (PRA)

Characterizes academic discourse. Argues for the need for some nonacademic writing in freshman writing courses. Discusses the different styles of academic discourse within the field of composition. Notes stylistic conventions of academic discourse. Discusses implications for the teaching of freshman writing. (RS)