Books

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

Inspired by an incident during a field trip in 1989, David Schaafsma has written a powerful and compelling book about the struggle of teaching literacy in a racially divided society and the importance of stories and storytelling in the educational process.

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.

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.

Composition in the University examines the required introductory course in composition within American colleges and universities. Crowley argues that due to its association with literary studies in English departments, composition instruction has been inappropriately influenced by humanist pedagogy and that modern humanism is not a satisfactory rationale for the study of writing. Crowley envisions possible nonhumanist rationales that could be developed for vertical curricula in writing instruction, were the universal requirement not in place.

Winner, 1998 MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize

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

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.