Language Arts & Disciplines / Composition & Creative Writing

Reimagines Listening Education to Account for Twenty-First Century Sonic Practices and Experiences

The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory presents a critical examination of rhetorical theory throughout history, in order to develop a unifying vision for the field. Demonstrating that theorists have always been skeptical of, yet committed to “truth” (however fantastic), Ira Allen develops rigorous notions of truth and of a “troubled freedom” that spring from rhetoric’s depths.

Resounding the Rhetorical offers an original critical and theoretical examination of composition as a quasi-object. As composition flourishes in multiple media (digital, sonic, visual, etc.) Byron Hawk seeks to connect new materialism with current composition scholarship and critical theory.

Winner of the 2019 CCCC Outstanding Book Award.

Lorimer Leonard shows how multilingual migrant women both succeed and struggle in their writing contexts. Based on a qualitative study of everyday multilingual writers in the United States, she shows how migrants’ literacies are revalued because they move with writers among their different languages and around the world. The book details the complicated reality of multilingual literacy, which is lived at the nexus of prejudice, prestige, and power.

Don Bialostosky aims to teach the reading of poetry and to advance an intellectual argument that brings the sociological poetics of the Bakhtin School to an introduction to reading poetry.

Teaching Queer looks closely at student writing, transcripts of class discussions, and teaching practices in first-year writing courses to articulate queer theories of literacy and writing instruction, while also considering the embodied actuality of being a queer teacher.

Ritter offers an extensive theoretical analysis of the alliance of the value systems inherent in postwar mental hygiene films (class-based ideals, democracy, patriotism) with writing education—an alliance that continues today by way of the mass digital technologies used in teaching online. She further details the larger material and cultural forces at work in the production of these films behind the scenes and their effects on education trends.

This edited volume offers new and revisionary narratives of composition and rhetoric’s history. It examines composition instruction and practice at secondary schools and normal colleges, the two institutions that trained the majority of U.S. composition teachers and students during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The chapters provide accounts of writing instruction within contexts often overlooked by current historical scholarship.

Recent global security threats, economic instability, and political uncertainty have placed great scrutiny on the requirements for U.S. citizenship. The stipulation of literacy has long been one of these criteria. In Producing Good Citizens, Amy J. Wan examines the historic roots of this phenomenon, looking specifically to the period just before World War I, up until the Great Depression. During this time, the United States witnessed a similar anxiety over the influx of immigrants, economic uncertainty, and global political tensions.Citing numerous literacy theorists, Wan analyzes the correlation of reading and writing skills to larger currents within American society. She shows how early literacy training coincided with the demand for laborers during the rise of mass manufacturing, while also providing an avenue to economic opportunity for immigrants.

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Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres examines the possibilities, challenges, and realities of mutimodal composition as an effective means of communication. The chapters view the ways that writing instructors and their students are exploring the spaces where communication occurs, while also asking “what else is possible.”

A critical history of experimental writing theory, its aesthetic foundations, and their application to current multimodal writing. Patricia Sullivan sheds new light on both the positive and negative aspects of experimental writing and its attempts to redefine the writing disciplines. She further articulates the ways that multimedia is and isn’t changing composition pedagogies, and provides insights into resolving these tensions.

Kelly Ritter chronicles the evolution of writing programs at a landmark Southern women’s college during the postwar period. She finds that despite its conservative Southern culture and vocational roots, the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina was a unique setting where advanced writing programs and creativity flourished long before these trends emerged nationally.

Lamos chronicles several decades of debates over high-risk writing programs on the national level, and locally, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign using critical race theorist Derrick Bell’s concept of “interest convergence.” To Lamos, understanding the past dynamics of convergence and divergence is key to formulating new strategies of local action and “story-changing” that can preserve and expand race-consciousness and high-risk writing instruction, even in adverse political climates.

Recipient of a special commendation from the 2013 (CCCC) Outstanding Book Award selection committee.

In the spring of 1968, the English faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) voted to remedialize the first semester of its required freshman composition course, English 101. The following year, it eliminated outright the second semester course, English 102. For the next quarter-century, UW had no real campus-wide writing requirement, putting it out of step with its peer institutions and preventing it from fully joining the “composition revolution” of the 1970s.

Fleming shows how contributing factors—the growing reliance on TAs; the questioning of traditional curricula by young instructors and their students; the disinterest of faculty in teaching and administering general education courses—were part of a larger shift affecting universities nationally. He also connects the events of this period to the long, embattled history of freshman composition in the United States.

Winner of the 2012 CCCC Outstanding Book AwardWinner of the 2011 MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize

Shipka views composition as an act of communication that can be expressed through any number of media and as a path to meaning-making. Her study offers an in-depth examination of multimodality via the processes, values, structures, and semiotic practices people employ every day to compose and communicate their thoughts. While she views writing as crucial to discourse, she challenges us to always consider the various purposes that writing serves.