Books

A Corrective to the Pervasive Belief That Digital Writing Practices are Entirely New

How Five Prominent Women Writers Reshaped the Essay in the Late Twentieth Century

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

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

Co-Winner of the 1998 Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize for outstanding research publication in the field of teaching English language, literature, rhetoric and composition, The Formation of College English reexamines the civic concerns of rhetoric and the politics that have shaped and continue to shape college English.

Co-Winner, 1997 MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize

Connors provides a comprehensive history of composition and its pedagogical approaches to form, genre, and correctness. He shows where many of the today’s practices and assumptions about writing come from, and he translates what our techniques and theories of teaching have said over time about our attitudes toward students, language, and life.

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

Offers a critique of current scholarly publishing practices, exposing the inequalities in the way academic knowledge is constructed and legitimized.

Winner of the 2002 JAC Gary A. Olson Award

Mariolina Salvatori presents an anthology of documents that examine the evolution of American education in the nineteenth century and meaning of the word pedagogy.

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.

Richard E. Miller questions the current views of the relationship between the humanities and daily life, and proposes that, in the face of increasing violence, the humanities should become more important, not less.

Winner of the 2006 CEE James H. Britton Award

Tim Mayers explores the nature of the contemporary English department with the intent of drawing connections between the usually separate fields of creative writing and composition studies.

An original and significant study of the developmental diversity within the discipline of composition that opens the door to further examination of local histories as guideposts to the origins of composition studies.

Contests the assumption that vitalism and contemporary rhetoric represent opposing, disconnected poles in the writing tradition. Vitalism has been historically linked to expressivism and dismissed as innate and unteachable, whereas rhetoric is seen as a rational, teachable method for producing argumentative texts. Hawk calls for the reexamination of current pedagogies to incorporate vitalism and complexity theory and argues for their application in the environments where students write and think today.

Winner of the 2007 JAC W. Ross Winterowd Award Honorable Mention, 2007 MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize

This book seeks to bring together the disciplines of linguistics, rhetoric, and literary studies through the concept of symmetry (how words mirror thought, society, and our vision of the world).

Honorable Mention, 2009 MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Award