John Trimbur. Agency and the Death of the Author: A Partial Defense of Modernism

Trimbur, John. “Agency and the Death of the Author: A Partial Defense of Modernism.” JAC 20.2 (2000): 283-298.

Summary:
This essay briefly surveys the disciplinary impact of discussions of the “death of the author,” and considers how such discussions seem to call for a “new theory” of agency that postmodernism is ill-equipped to provide. Trimbur draws on Raymond Williams’ idea of “structures of feeling” and offers a reading of modernism to suggest that our contemporary relation to modernism need not be an all-or-nothing affair. Instead, Trimbur offers a more historically nuanced reading of the Enlightenment/modernism with the goal of retaining some sense of authorship and production.

Area Cluster(s): 103-Theory

Methodology: Theory, History

MVCitations: KMarx, RWilliams, MFoucault, WBenjamin

Money Quotes:
From my vantage point, the story of the death of the author has simply brought us back to the problem of agency as Marx posed it when he said that people make their history but not in conditions of their own making (285).

Following Williams, we may think of agency as a structure of feeling and in so doing insist that agency is not epiphenomenal in the older Marxian sense, but is instead the remainder of lived experience for which there is no necessary external counterpart that compels the shape or allegiances of our experience and action (288).

…we need a notion of the author all the more–as a vital point to organize around, in writers’ guilds, unions, congresses, cooperateives, and other associations for self-management (296).

The corrosive effects of postmodernism show up most distressingly, I think, in the way theorizing has shaken the old modernist faith in our capacity to socialize the conditions and products of our own labor (297).

James E. Porter, Patricia Sullivan, Stuart Blythe, Jeffrey T. Grabill, and Libby Miles. Institutional Critique: A Rhetorical Methodology for Change.

Porter, James E., et. al. “Institutional Critique: A Rhetorical Methodology for Change.” CCC 51.4 (2000): 610-642.

Summary: We offer institutional critique as an activist methodology for changing institutions. Since institutions are rhetorical entities, rhetoric can be deployed to change them. In its effort to counter oppressive institutional structures, the field of rhetoric and composition has focused its attention chiefly on the composition classroom, on the department of English, and on disciplinary forms of critique. Our focus shifts the scene of action and argument to professional writing and to public discourse, using spatial methods adapted from postmodern geography and critical theory.

Area Cluster(s): 102-Composition Programs, 105-Research, 107-Institutional and Professional

Methodology: Institutional Critique

MVCitations: DHarvey, JSosnoski, KHansen, Porter & Sullivan

Money Quotes:
Institutional change requires attention to the material and spatial conditions of disciplinary practices inside a particular institution (620).

As we uncover and probe the zones of ambiguity present in a system, we can articulate the power moves used to maintain or even extend control over boundaries (624).

Institutional critique examines institutions as rhetorical designs–mapping the conflicted frameworks in these heterogeneous and contested spaces, articulating the hidden and seemingly silent voices of those marginalized by the powerful, and observing how power operates within institutional space–in order to expose and interrogate possibilities for institutional change through the practice of rhetoric (631).

Hewett, Beth L. “Characteristics of Interactive Oral and Computer-Mediated Peer Group Talk and Its Influence on Revision”

Hewett, Beth L. “Characteristics of Interactive Oral and Computer-Mediated Peer Group Talk and Its Influence on Revision.” Computers and Composition 17 (2000):265-288.

Summary:”This article details a functional and qualitative study of interactive oral and computer-mediated communication (CMC)-generated Norton Connect peer response group talk and its influence on revision. The interactive peer groups in both environments talked primarily about their writing. However, the talk had different qualities when students used different media, suggesting that medium shapes talk. Oral talk focused contextually on abstract, global idea development, whereas Connect talk focused more on concrete writing tasks and group management. Each environment generated qualitatively different talk regarding referential and phatic contact. Students revised using ideas generated from both oral and Connect talk. However, revision changes revealed different qualities when developed in different environments, suggesting that medium shapes revision. Revision from Connect talk included more frequent direct use of peer ideas, whereas revision from oral talk included more frequent intertextual (imitative and indirect) and self-generated idea use.”

Area Cluster: 106-Information Technologies; 101-Practices of Teaching Writing

Citations: Cindy Selfe, Gail Hawisher, Anne Gere and Robert Abbott, Marshall McLuhan

Methodology: Social Sciences, Pedagogical Reflection, Coding, Recording, Observation

Money Quotes:

“However, despite much consideration and research in the past 25 years, we still don’t know enough about how peer-response groups talk and how talk influences revision tasks” (266).

“The functional analysis of the peer talk revealed three primary findings: (a) interactive peer groups in both communicative environments talked primarily about their writing; (b) the interactive peer talk is functionally comparable to Gere and Abbott’s (1985) results; and (c) the talk itself had different qualities when students used different media, suggesting that the medium shapes the talk” (274).

“The hybrid nature of CONNECT-generated talk is primary to this study’s analysis. Marshall McLuhan (1964), in an early examination of the effects of media on communication, directly linked the medium in which communication occurs with the message it communicates: “‘the medium is the message’ because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action” (p. 24). Similarly, the electronic medium appears to have shaped Group 2’s (CMC) talk in three ways: (1) the development of contextual writing-focused talk, (2) an increase in group-focused talk, and (3) the interactive nature of the talk” (276).

“These findings suggest that oral peer talk sessions may encourage both the use of context-focused talk and the intertextual exchange of ideas within the group” (282).

“Finally, as Gere and Abbott (1985) suggest, peer-response group talk allows students to rehearse their ideas orally. This study validates their findings and suggests that students self-generate ideas, not only in direct connection with their own writing, but also as they talk about peers’ writing. Again, it is the interaction among group members that inspires students to talk and think about their writing, encouraging them to make connections among their ideas and those of their peers” (284).

Hesford, Wendy S. “Visual Auto/biography, Hysteria, and the Pedagogical Performance of the ‘Real.’”

Hesford, Wendy S. “Visual Auto/biography, Hysteria, and the Pedagogical Performance of the ‘Real.’” JAC 20.2 (2000): 350-89.

Summary:

“Who is in control? Whose story is being told and by whom? Who speaks and who is heard?” (357). These are the questions that Wendy Hesford’s Women in Literature course tries to answer, particularly in the Gender Madness unit, which is one of “five thematic clusters” into which the course is arranged. The main artifact Hesford focuses on in this article is Mindy Faber’s “auto/biographical video about her mother’s long battle with mental illness” (350), Delirium, in which Faber subverts and disrupts conventional documentary standards by playing with notions of agency and representation. Hesford thoroughly historicizes feminine hysteria, giving a very detailed description of Charcot’s demonstrations at La Salpetriere (accent marks omitted) (359), where he and other medical professionals made spectacles of women by the thousands. Hesford’s use of Delirium is meant to help students critically reflect on the ways in which the “identificatory lure of normative positions can foster a critique of how cultural narratives and classification systems shape interpretive processes” (351), even though Hesford admits that the film seemed to do more to reinforce and uphold dominant narratives in most students than to challenge them.

Hesford undertakes a lengthy analysis of the kinds of resistance her students were most likely to exhibit, painting them against a backdrop of anti-feminist backlash, which characterizes feminism as victimology (376). While Hesford acknowledges that her pedagogy did not, in a sense, “succeed” in the purpose of awakening all of her students to the social construction of gender and madness, she points to this reality as an indication of the pressing work that needs to be done in ideology reformation and finally embraces such a unstable paradigm for its potential to “exploit, not resolve… its own unreliability” (380).

Area Cluster:
101-Practices of Teaching Writing; 104-History; 103-Theory

Methodology:

Pedagogical Experimentation; Theory; History; Dissection of Dominant Politics

Most Valuable Citations:

Teresa Ebert, Mindy Faber, Foucault, hooks, Janice Haaken, Linda Hutcheon, Lynn Worsham

Money Quotes:
“In an academic climate increasingly dominated by an ethos of individualism, it seems more crucial than ever to engage our students in an analysis of how the production and reception of auto/biographical representations are mediated by cultural, ideological, and pedagogical frames of reference” (350).

“Students’ resistance to Mindy Faber’s Delirium “…speak[s] to the lingering antagonism between hysteria and feminism and dramatize the tensions posed by feminist acts of appropriation and parody” (356).

“Instead of seeing the multiple roles depicted in the film as a playful yet critical re-staging of the hysterical plots and as a critical commentary on the spectator-spectacle relation, many students read them as further indication of the daughter’s (read: feminism’s) insensitive manipulation of her mother’s experience (read: the ‘real’)” (376).

“The antagonism between feminism and the ideology of the traditional family is a contemporary incarnation of the nineteenth-century hysterical plot that situated feminism as an antagonist in an even larger betrayal narrative” (377).

“Instead of typecasting students as passive vessels or overdetermined viewers, or positioning ‘difference’ as a pedagogical spectacle and ourselves as liberators or saviors… we must examine how our students negotiate a sense of critical agency among conflicting cultural discourses” (379).

Bizzell, Patricia. “Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric: What Difference Do They Make?”

Bizzell, Patricia. “Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric: What Difference Do They Make?” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30.4 (2000): 5-17.

Summary:

Bizzell addresses the exchange that took place in College English between Gale, Jarratt, and Glenn surrounding the subjects of objective representations of history and of truth, female essentialism among certain feminist belief systems, and the deployment of passion into academic scholarship. She begins by proudly listing the female authors she has been able to add to the second edition of the Rhetorical Tradition anthology, noting that the number of women included in the second edition helps recognize the fact that women have had a part to play in the rhetorical tradition, albeit one which has often endured in silence and neglect. She moves on to discuss the conversation between Gale, Jarratt, and Glenn, identifying what she believes to be Gale’s weaknesses and, despite a position of careful removal (she claims that she thinks “that none of the participants in this exchange adequately address the role of postmodern theory in feminist research methods” (8), she aligns herself with the arguments put forth by Jarratt and Glenn.

She examines Gale’s aversion to Glenn’s writing of Aspasia, identifying Gale’s claims that Glenn and Jarratt are too passionate, too assertive, and too personally invested in including women in the rhetorical tradition in order further their political agenda of exposing hierarchal power structures (11). Bizzell believes that this methodological debate over the “function of emotions in scholarly work” (12) is one that is rich with possibilities as feminist scholarship moves forward in reclaiming its place in the rhetorical tradition.

As such, she spends the last section of her essay discussing a scholar whom she believes to exemplify a powerful blending of rhetorical agency and personal involvement in her scholarship: Jacqueline Jones Royster. Bizzell uses Royster’s “study of African American women’s rhetoric and social action, entitled Traces of a Stream” (13), to illustrate how Royster “addresses in detail the methodological questions [she has] raised here” (13). The four-part afrafeminist ideology – or what Bizzell would call her ‘methodology’ – consists of 1) attention to basic skills in research; 2) acknowledgment of passionate attachment; 3) attention to ethical action; and 4) commitment to social responsibility. Finally, Bizzell concludes, from her position as a canonical authority in the field, that embodied feminist methodologies that search for truth(s) instead of Truth “have made all the difference” when it comes to what counts in our field (16).

Area Cluster:

105-Research; 103-Theory

Methodology:

Exertion of Authority; Affective Distancing; Picking A Side; Historiography; “State of the Discipline”

Most Valuable Citations:

Xin Liu Gale, Cheryl Glenn, Susan Jarratt, Jackie Jones Royster

Money Quotes:

“If we think of the tasks of traditional research as discovering neglected authors, providing basic research on their lives and theories, and bringing out critical editions of their work, my survey of current work undertaken for the new edition of the Rhetorical Tradition anthology suggests that few, if any, other areas of research in the history of rhetoric have produced such rich results of this kind as feminist research” (7).

“What becomes critical… is the acknowledgment of the multiple functions of emotions and experiences in defining one’s relationship to one’s research, a departure from traditional methods that Royster calls ‘practices of disregard,’ which might be the practices that produce the emotional coolness I saw Gale preferring in Henry [a historian and writer of a book length study on Aspasia, whom Gale admires for her 'painstaking attention to detail' and 'meticulousness']” (13).

“Royster is at pains to specify that even the values and perspectives of communities she holds dear cannot be allowed to hold uninterrogated sway over critical discourse. She continually stresses the need for cross-questioning among communities, not only, as noted above, between the academic community and the African American women’s community… but also between these communities and representatives of other standpoints who may be drawn to research in this area” (15).

In asking whether these feminist methodologies have radically departed from the rhetorical tradition, Bizzell answers “No” on several counts, but answers “Yes” in that “in order to get at the activities of these new rhetors, researchers have had to adopt radically new methods as well, methods which violate some of the most cherished conventions of academic research, most particularly in bringing the person of the researcher, her body, her emotions, and dare one say, her soul, into the work” (16).

Jarratt, Susan C. “Rhetoric and Feminism: Together Again.”

Jarratt, Susan C. “Rhetoric and Feminism: Together Again.” College English 62.3 (2000): 390-3.

Summary:

This selection is a response to Xin Liu Gale’s article “Historical Studies and Postmodernism: Rereading Aspasia of Miletus”, in which Gale disparages feminist methodologies used by both Cheryl Glenn and Susan Jarratt (and their cowriters) in two seperate re-readings of Aspasia. Gale’s article mourns the neglect with which feminist scholars treat what she seems to believe as the pure pursuit of the Truth, inventing instead alternative truths to fit their radical political purposes and eschewing the kind of careful, methodical reasearch practices that used to constitute sound scholarship. Jarratt’s response, which appears in the same issue as the debut of Gale’s article (as well as Cheryl Glenn’s reply), cooly addresses Gale’s attacks to feminist methodology by attempting to systematically dismantle first Gale’s intellectual capacity to understand her [Jarratt's] work; Gale’s interest in or fitness for the scholarship of rhetoric; and Gale’s credability as a scholar who has read enough to be savvy to the disruptive ways of research methodology and meaning making undertaken in postmodern feminism.

Area Cluster:

105-Research; 103-Theory

Methodology:

Refutation, Exclustionary Tactics, Authoritative Muscle, Intellectual Sparring.

Most Valuable Citations:
Judith Butler, Jacqueline Rhodes, Richard Rorty, Lynn Worsham.

Money Quotes:
“Gale finds a problem in feminist historians making both factual claims and interpretive assumptions. She informs me and Rory that we cannot take ‘Aspasia’ both as a rhetorical construct in Plato’s text and as a real person (21). Why not? Gale, using Rorty’s categories of historical and rational reconstruction, finds a contradiction between the speculative leaps required to initiate feminist history–to imafine the world differently from the way it has been handed down to us–and the facutal claims needed to make those claims persuasive” (391).

“How, then, do we evaluate postmodern/feminist histories? This question was productively addressed in the ‘Octalog’ Gale cites, a conversation among historians of rhetoric on just these issues. The answer offered there and in a host of other historiographical materials generated over the past two decades suggests that new histories will be evaluated by rhetorical criteria… But Gale seems in general averse to rhetoric” (391).

“The specter of a feminism that is One, denying difference, should not be dismissed without examination but should be tested in the abundant feminist woek in rhetoric and composition–work undertaken by scholars from many different locations” (392).

“I would invite Professor Gale to read more widely in feminist work in rhetoric and composition, helping us discover whether indeed feminists are constructing some kind of monolithic and exclusionary field, and to continue to participate in exchanges and dialogue such as this one” (393).

[Related Citations]
Gale, Xin Liu. “Historical Studies and Postmodernism: Rereading Aspasia of Miletus.” College English 62.3 (2000): 361-86.

Glenn, Cheryl. “Truth, Lies, and Method: Revisiting Feminist Historiography.” College English 62.3 (2000): 387-9.

Gale, Xin Liu. “Xin Liu Gale Responds.” College English 63.1 (2000): 105-7.

Ballif, Michelle, D. Diane Davis, and Roxanne Mountford. “Negotiating the Differend: A Feminist Trilogue.”

Ballif, Michelle, D. Diane Davis, and Roxanne Mountford. “Negotiating the Differend: A Feminist Trilogue.” JAC 20.3 (2000): 583-625.

Summary:

The three scholars begin the trilogue by invoking Burke’s parlor conversation – except the focus here is on the fact that particular parlor in which feminist conversations take place has “discursive protocols, and we feminists often enforce them by interrupting and ejecting each other…” (583). This lengthy and highly theoretical conversation consists primarily of these scholars’ attempts to grapple with traditional methods of meaning making vs. those made possible by postmodern and specifically feminist ways of knowing. The conversationalists bring to bear a panoply of distinguished thinkers and scholars to lend weight to their intellectual suppositions and conjectures surrounding such fundamental issues as understanding, naming, and knowing; they distinguish each issue from the other as occupying different and always relative or mutable places on a spectrum of knowledge acquisition and application.

They most want to explore the essentialism that keeps “feminisms” disconnected. Because feminists have not truly accepted the postmodern condition as laid out by Lyotard (590), they are unable to “encourage an affirmation of the incommensurabilities that feminism already houses” (590). The women discuss the ways in which feminists “trash” each other through gossip and across generational and party lines but differentiate these destructive activities from “taking on” another feminist’s intellectual work. These boundaries, too, are blurred by their troubled understanding of differences, which they find to be “symptoms of differance,” which roughly boiled down is a facet of the Other which is both unhearable and unknowable.

Their conversation weaves in and out of anecdotes, personal experience, and high theory; they bring in Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H., in which the main character encounters a cockroach, can’t understand it and so is disgusted and afraid, partly mashes it in the doorway, begins to feel empathy and shame in her disconnectedness, and tries to “take in” the Other – by tasting the white paste oozing from it, which results in a violent puking fit. This torrid little tale offers perhaps the most vivid encapsulation of the essence of the trilogue: feminists must not attempt to assimilate the other, but must learn to acknowledge differance and embrace (mis)understanding – a shift that would liberate feminist discourse from the pitfalls inherent in dominant, hierarchical models of knowledge and a move that Michelle imagines might “require… that we risk the parlor itself” (613).

Area Cluster:

103-Theory

Methodology:

Discourse Subversion; System of Knowledge Disruption; Discipline Definition; Philosophies of Meaning Making; Postmodern Theory

Most Valuable Citations:

Practically Everyone: Baudrillard; Burke; Judith Butler; Cixous; Foucault; Paul de Man; Derrida; Kristeva; Lyotard; bell hooks; Irigaray; Haraway; Jarratt; Royster; Krista Ratcliffe; Avital Ronell; Lynn Worsham.

Money Quotes:

“Diane: Interstanding, as I understand it–sets out each time to spotlight the impossibility of this necessary and very operational phantasm that you are calling ‘understanding,’ this originary ‘agreement’ that makes communication possible but that makes it possible only at the expense of wiping out that for which it can’t account.

Michelle: I agree and disagree here. …’[N]ormal discourse is that which is conducted within an agreed-upon set of conventions about what counts as a relevant contribution, what counts as answering a question, what counts as having a good argument for that answer or a good criticism of it’” (Rorty as qtd. 589).

“To judge one genre of discourse across the rules of another is to commit epistemological violence; it is, in this case, to drag the discourse of an/Other feminist into one’s own discourse arenato be clobbered” (591).

“It seems to me that feminism’s future lies in affirming the so-called indecent; in fact, I’d say feminism’s home lies in that affirmation. But that also suggests that we feminists are a long way from home–and also that we’ll never finally arrive, that at best we’ll always be on our way home, on our way out of the world that phallogocentrism has made. The question for me is to find a way to chart this expropriating course home. How do we set our sights on an exuberant feminism that refrains from becoming phallogocentrism’s ‘answering machine,’ as Ronell puts it–a feminism that’s beyond reaction, that overflows boundaries, that embraces its own differance?” (610).

Merrill, Yolanda. “Anchoring WAC by Focusing on Rhetorical Analysis in First-Year Composition.”

Bibliography:

Merrill, Yolanda. “Anchoring WAC by Focusing on Rhetorical Analysis in First-Year

Composition.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines. 4.1 (2000): 71-73.

 

Merrill discusses the motivations for the revised first-year composition course at the University of Arizona.  The changes included: 1. teaching rhetorical analysis using reading written by their faculty “across the disciplines; 2. increasing the writing component in general education courses; 3. students to complete a mid-career writing assessment; and 4. revising the major WID courses to focus on “discourse analysis of writing in disciplines building on students’ first-year experience in rhetorical analysis” (71).  Merrill suggests with the new rhetorical structure and increased faculty development, WAC will support first-year composition and the disciplinary curriculum.

 

Area Cluster:

            101 Practices of Teaching Writing.

 

Methodology:

            Discourse Analysis.

 

Valuable Citation:

            Merrill, Y.

 

Money Quotes:

“This [rhetorical] approach has two advantages: it provides students with 1) a theoretical approach to performing the diverse writing tasks they will encounter at the university and 2) experience in performing thinking skills highly valued by faculty across the curriculum: analysis, interpretation, synthesis, application, and invention, . . .” (71).

 

“They [faculty] discovered they had usually failed to specify, in clearly worded assignments for their students, either the particular thinking demanded by the task or the disciplinary rhetorical conventions for the text they expected.  In the first-year composition course, therefore, we teach the terminology for the thinking skills and raise students’ awareness to them for texts they will write for disciplinary faculty, using models of faculty writing” (72).

 

“Composition students pursue a research question in the disciplinary area of their interest; engage the articles from their anthology written by faculty in this area; converse with the authors themselves if possible about their thinking, writing processes and strategies; and write their own position papers presenting their conclusions about the issue or intellectual problem they have researched” (72).

 

Stewart, Margaret E., Pat Mower, Diane McMillen, Mary McCoy, Patti McCormick, Pam McDonald, Donna LaLonde, Sarah Cook, and Gary Baker. “Faculty Collaboration on Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Assignments: Linking Teaching and Scholarship.”

Bibliography:

Stewart, Margaret E., Pat Mower, Diane McMillen, Mary McCoy, Patti McCormick, Pam

McDonald, Donna LaLonde, Sarah Cook, and Gary Baker. “Faculty Collaboration on Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Assignments: Linking Teaching and Scholarship.” Language and Learning Across the Disciplines. 4.1 (2000): 67-69.

 

In a Washburn University WAC Group, the contributors reflect on the importance of teaching, collaborations of “scholarly publications,” and experimental assignments, which have the ability to link the other two.  The groups stressed the importance of dialogue and collaboration to increase moments of teacher reflection and professional creativity.  Although the members represented various disciplines, their WAC collaboration not only aided their entry into the “scholarship of teaching,” but it also fostered an eagerness to pursue new classroom practices.

 

Area Cluster:

            101 Practices of Teaching Writing.

 

Methodology:

            Pedagogical inquiry.

 

Valuable Citations:

            Stewart, M.; Mower, P.; McMillen, D.; McCoy, M.; McCormick, P.; MacDonald, P,; LaLonde, D.; Cook, S.; Baker, G.; Young, A.; and Washburn University WAC Discussion Group.

 

Money Quotes:

“We were so impressed with our students’ creativity that we organized a campus-wide coffee house reading where all the students who participated in the WAC assignment could share their work with the whole community.  We have now institutionalized this coffee-house reading as an annual event, a place where students can, as one writers’ group puts it, “write out loud” (Seattle)” (68).

 

“We started to collaborate on articles and conference presentations (Konzem and Baker; Kent, Stewart, and Baker; Stewart, LaLonde, and Baker; Washburn University Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Discussion Group, “Creative,” “Learning,” “Revitalizing”) and to offer workshops of our own (Washburn University Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Discussion Group, In-service, Faculty)” (69).

 

“Thus, our collaborative experimental assignments help us link teaching and scholarship in a way that connected the energy from the one with the energy from the other. Those elements form a circle that mirrors our faculty WAC group, sitting around a meeting room on a Friday afternoon, talking about teaching” (69).

Parks, Steve and Eil Goldblatt. “Writing beyond the Curriculum: Fostering New Collaborations in Literacy.”

Bibliography:

Parks, Steve and Eil Goldblatt. “Writing beyond the Curriculum: Fostering New

Collaborations in Literacy.” College English. 62.5 (2000): 584-606.

 

Parks and Goldblatt look at WAC and its “standard structure” within college writing programs.  They argue for a shift in WAC by moving writing and literacy beyond college and university campuses. “Writing beyond the Curriculum” would utilize elements such as Literacy and Literature Research, Business and Professional Outreach, Technology Leadership, K-16 Connections, WID, First-Year Writing, Faculty development, Student Support, Service and Experiential Learning, and Community Literacy Projects. This new collaborations in WAC, with attention to writing, literacy instruction, learning environments, and curriculums, will also give more focus to graduate training and teacher preparation to meet the needs of the field and its students, “to go beyond the “beyond.”

 

Area Clusters:

110 Academic Writing; 103 Theory.

 

Methodology:

Curriculum and Program Design.

 

Valuable Citations:

Parks, S.; Goldblatt, E.; McLead, S.; DeStigter, T.; Berlin, J.; Cushman, E.; Miller, R.; Brodkey, L.

                       

Money Quotes:

Draw on Russell’s view of WAC, “The movement won battles to shift instruction away from mechanical “skills” and toward the discourse of text-based disciplinary communities, but it gained its success because it “linked writing not only to learning and student development but also to the intellectual interest of specialists” (585).

 

“If compositionists and rhetoricians are to act upon the current research and theory in our journals, writing programs can no longer be limited to introducing students to the rhetoric of academic fields and majors.  Our attention to public discourse (e.g., Cushman “Critical”; DeStigter), cultural studies (e.g., Berlin and Vivion), and the weaving of personal stories into academic argument (e.g., Brodkey; Goldblatt; R. Miller) suggest that writing and rhetoric teachers have much to offer students beyond either traditional belletristic notions of the essay or discipline-specific understanding of effective prose” (586).