Books

Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness traces the attempts of one writing teacher to understand theoretically – and to respond pedagogically – to what happens when students from diverse backgrounds learn to use language in college. Critical of even her own previous work, Patricia Bizzell presents a picture of how she has grappled with major issues in composition studies over the past decade and offers suggestions for the development of composition studies as an academic discipline.

In an insightful assessment of the study and teaching of writing against the larger theoretical, political, and technological upheavals of the past thirty years, Fragments of Rationality questions why composition studies has been less affected by postmodern theory than other humanities and social science disciplines.

Winner of the 1994 CCCC Outstanding Book Award Winner of the 1992 MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize

These essays examine how women from the period of ancient Greece all the way through to modern times have appropriated traditional forms of rhetoric and used them in women’s discourse.

A compelling collection by one of the pioneers of revisionist approaches to the history of literacy in North America and Europe, The Labyrinths of Literacy offers original and controversial views on the relation of literacy to society, leading the way for scholars and citizens who are willing to question the importance and function of literacy in the development of society today.

This volume describes the formative years of English composition courses in college through a study of the most prominent documents of the time: magazine articles, scholarly reports, early textbooks, teachers’ testimonies-and some of the actual student papers that provoked discussion. Includes writings by leading scholars of the era such as Adams Sherman Hill, Gertrude Buck, William Edward Mead, Lane Cooper, William Lyon Phelps, and Fred Newton Scott.

Winner, 1997 CCCC Outstanding Book Award

The essays in this book show how the act of translation, when vigilantly and critically attended to, becomes a means for active interrogation.

JoAnn Campbell has created the first collection of the major work of innovative thinker and educator Gertrude Buck. Examples of her writings on rhetorical theory, argumentative and expository composition, and other works demonstrate, along with Campbell’s informative introduction, the importance of Buck’s achievements in the male-dominated world of rhetorical composition.

Focuses on expressions of popular culture among blacks in Africa, the United States, and the Carribean. Fifteen essays cover a world of topics, from American girls’ Double Dutch games to protest discourse in Ghana; from the history of Rasta to the evolving significance of kente cloth from rap video music to hip-hop to zouk.

Traces of a Stream offers a unique scholarly perspective that merges interests in rhetorical and literacy studies, United States social and political theory, and African American women writers. Focusing on elite nineteenth-century African American women who formed a new class of women well positioned to use language with consequence, Royster uses interdisciplinary perspectives (literature, history, feminist studies, African American studies, psychology, art, sociology, economics) to present a well-textured rhetorical analysis of the literate practices of these women.

Winner of the 2000 MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize

Available Means offers seventy women rhetoricians—from ancient Greece to the twenty-first century—a room of their own for the first time. Editors Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald carry on the feminist tradition of recovering a previously unarticulated canon of women’s rhetoric.

Mary Soliday reveals that institutions’ needs for remedial writing programs may outweigh students’ needs for those same programs. Uses CCNY’s open admissions policy as an in-depth case study, she questions the belief that language use is key to access to higher education.

Winner of the 2004 CCCC Outstanding Book Award

Crossing Borderlands contains essays examining the intersection between composition and postcolonial studies, two fields that seek to provide power to the words and actions of those who have been marginalized or oppressed.

Sarah Robbins identifies and defines a new genre in American letters—the domestic literacy narrative—and provides a cultural history of its development throughout the nineteenth century.

Winner of an Outstanding Academic Title Award from Choice Magazine (2006).

Looks at ways to encourage American public discussion of issues that matter to democracy, particularly hoping to find arguments that can reach across the divide between liberalism and Christian fundamentalism in the discussion of civic issues.

Winner of the 2006 JAC Gary A. Olson AwardWinner of the 2008 Rhetoric Society of America Book AwardWinner of the 2008 CCCC Outstanding Book AwardWinner of the 2007 NCTE David H. Russell Award

Scholars of rhetoric, composition, and communications analyze how discourse is used to construct working-class identities. The essays connect working-class identity to issues of race, gender, and sexuality, among others.