Books

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.

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

English has become the language of choice for global economic, political, and cultural exchange. Many developing countries (and, notably, many former Soviet bloc countries) have little choice but to “buy into English” as a path to ideological and material betterment. As Catherine Prendergast reveals, however, investing in English has not always been easy and has often disappointed expectations.

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

Rhetorica in Motion is the first collected work to investigate feminist rhetorical research methods in both contemporary and historical contexts. The contributors analyze familiar themes, such as archival, literary, and online research, but also looks to other areas of rhetoric, such as disability studies; gerontology/aging studies; Latina/o, queer, and transgender studies; performance studies; and transnational feminisms in both the United States and larger geopolitical spaces.

Wit’s End is an original perspective on women’s use of humor as a performative strategy, seen in works of twentieth-century American literature. Zwagerman argues that women, whose direct, explicit performative speech has been traditionally denied, or not taken seriously, have often turned to humor as a means of communicating with men.

This work examines critical intersections of rhetoric and solidarity in order to demonstrate that a rhetorical imperative—an underivable obligation to respond—is the condition for symbolic exchange, and therefore not only for the “art”of rhetoric, but for all determinate relations.

Winner of the 2010 JAC W. Ross Winterowd Award

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.

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

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.

An original study on the use and misuse of global institutional rhetoric and the effects of these practices on women, particularly in developing countries. Using a feminist lens, Rebecca Dingo views the complex networks that rhetoric flows through, globally and nationally, and how it’s often reconfigured to work both for and against women and to maintain existing power structures.

Winner of the 2012 JAC W. Ross Winterowd Award

Jenny Rice examines patterns of public discourse that have evolved in response to development in urban and suburban environments. Centering her study on Austin, Texas, Rice provides case studies of development disputes that place the reader in the middle of real-life controversies and evidence her theories of claims-based public rhetorics.

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.

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.”

In Ambient Rhetoric, Thomas Rickert seeks to dissolve the boundaries of the rhetorical tradition and its basic dichotomy of subject and object. With the advent of new technologies, new media, and the dispersion of human agency through external information sources, rhetoric can no longer remain tied to the autonomy of human will and cognition as the sole determinants in the discursive act. Rickert develops the concept of ambience to engage all of the elements that comprise the ecologies in which we exist.

Winner, 2014 CCCC Outstanding Book Award.