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This essay delineates essential features of memory as a salient topos of rhetorical literature, both classical and modern. This essay also considers how both the arts of rhetoric and memory alike underwent cultural devaluation in Western modernity only to reappear in altered forms as compelling objects of analysis. In doing so, the essay contends that current enthusiasms for the study of collective memory in communication and composition studies alike signify forms of simultaneous connection and disconnection with the historical role of rhetoric in the classical art of memory.

Rhetoric and composition, as an academic discipline, argues for a strong link between scholarship and practice. However, restrictive publisher agreements, limited distribution channels, and percept...

This project contributes to recent work on comics in composition studies and education, which notes that comics are more than a simple or accessible gateway to text-based literacy. I argue for the ...

Given that research in language and literacy studies proffers multilingual and translingual literacy studies as central to contemporary English studies, English studies can benefit from increased attention to hip-hop language practices. While some linguists have argued for closer analysis of hip-hop nation language (HHNL) because of its relevance to youth identities and promise for critical language pedagogies, I argue that the concept of flow within HHNL studies has been largely overlooked for its value to the rhetorical development of students in English studies. While some linguists have employed the concept of flow to discuss the global movement of Black English across the globe and its implications for English as a lingua franca, flow also highlights the manner and means that artists use to move between ideas, concepts and dispositions in their compositions and therefore becomes valuable to the way English teachers may teach, study and discuss with students the possibilities of language. Beca...

Prompted by a moment in the classroom in which the DJ becomes integral for the writing instructor, this article looks at how the hip-hop DJ and hip-hop DJ/Producer become the intrinsic examples for first-year college writing students to think about how they conduct revision in their writing. After a review of two seminal hip-hop books and other scholarly sources that situate the viability of hip-hop discourse in the classroom, this article frames the hip-hop DJ as critical to the progression of the hip-hop producer and uses the hip-hop DJ/Producer as the catalyst for revision by looking at the original version and remix of two classic hip-hop songs. The unique collaborative investment between the hip-hop DJ/Producer and emcee/MC in creating ‘the remix’ presents an intriguing conundrum for the ways we might envision teaching practices in composition studies. Central to this moment is the way hip-hop flips the script on racist ideologies constructed as anti-hip-hop sentiments in academic spaces and allows s...

This article serves to introduce a new technology for student feedback on written assignments to political scientists. Developed in the field of composition studies, screencapture commentary is a novel technique designed to provide audiovisual responses to student writing. To receive feedback, students watch a recorded video of the instructor’s computer terminal, listening to the instructor’s commentary while watching the cursor move and highlight selections of the text for illustration. The final section of this article demonstrates preliminary evidence of improved educational outcomes in courses taught at two large 4-year universities where screencapture technology was employed. On the basis of these findings, I also argue that screencapture comments may be especially beneficial in online course environments.

This article links language requirements in rhetoric and composition graduate programs to a dominant monolingualist ideology in composition studies. It argues that future faculty can be best prepared to conduct disciplinary work in the context of linguistic heterogeneity through a variety of collaborative pedagogical practices that reflect and advance a “translingual” language ideology.

Recent scholarship in rhetoric and composition studies theorizes agency as irreducible to human cause-and-effect. While this theory infiltrates many disciplinary conversations, however, our reliance on the terms students and teachers within pedagogical discourses manages our rhetorical imagination of pedagogical agency by committing us to individual, human agents every time we invoke these terms. Rather than expel these terms and the important work they underwrite, we can draw on social systems terminology of elements and relations in order to account for the ways that students and teachers emerge as agents and to imagine alternative conceptualizations of pedagogical agency.

Lynda Barry's book What It Is offers an alternative idea of composition pedagogy, utilizing an approach that communication scholars might call “invitational rhetoric.” Barry resources the trappings traditionally associated with education and invites the reader to render experiences through his or her own writing practice. This article explores invitational rhetoric as represented in various fields, particularly composition and rhetoric, and examines how Barry's What It Is serves as a model of invitational rhetoric. The article also considers how the book offers a way of teaching invitational rhetoric as a less adversarial form of argument.

Composition studies has recently increasingly engaged with economic concerns, as evidenced by the 2012 Watson Conference on “Economies of Writing” and a corresponding special issue of JAC. However, that increased engagement has not reflected an increased engagement with economic scholarship, resulting in a rhetoric that represents economy as either beyond intervention or a metaphor for non-economic phenomenon. Attention to economic scholarship can provide composition studies with a rhetoric that opens possibilities for economic agency.

Like other forms of intellectual property, patents have increasingly been the subject of controversy regarding their successes and failures in promoting and channeling innovation. But unlike other forms of intellectual property, patents are constituted and defined in terms of officially sanctioned texts. As a consequence, patents are deeply embedded in communities of composition, interpretation, and practice. This paper outlines how genre analysis can be applied to interrogate the “typified rhetorical action” of the patent system and its constituent communities. It argues and demonstrates that understanding the rhetorical work of patents is key to addressing current criticisms of the patent system.

2014 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Janice M. Lauer’s “Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline,” in which Lauer looks back to the field’s “pioneering efforts” at cobbling together a disciplinary identity—as she articulated, the field of rhetoric and composition’s most important questions “would have remained isolated and unexplored as they had been for decades if it were not for … a shared trait of these early theorists—their willingness to take risks, to go beyond the boundaries of their traditional training into foreign domains in search of starting points, theoretical launching pads from which to begin investigating these questions” (21). This interview reengages Lauer’s suggestion that the field’s early boundary-crossing transformed rhetoric and composition into a multifaceted and dappled discipline composed of a manifold of theoretical and onto-epistemological perspectives.

This article examines the ways that creative writing instructors may willingly (or unintentionally) suppress contradiction and indeterminacy in workshop feedback conversations. By suggesting that contradiction and indeterminacy may be fruitful and dynamic sites to investigate craft practice, aesthetics, and authorship, the essay argues for a reassessment of the way teachers facilitate workshop. In addition to drawing on experience in the classroom, the author suggests that workshop become a site where rhetorical and artistic invention are intermeshed in the sophistic pedagogical tradition of antilogike and dissoi logoi (rhetorical strategies emphasising contradiction and doubt, rather than certainty). The concept of antilogike is connected to workshop pedagogy through an analysis of William Covino's Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy: An Eccentric History of the Composing Imagination. In the book, Covino suggests that generative magic (rather than arresting magic) provides a lens to analyse language and instit...

This article examines how an online scholarly journal, Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy, mentors authors to revise their webtexts (interactive, digital media scholarship) for publication. Using an editorial pedagogy in which multimodal and rhetorical genre theories are merged with revision techniques found in process-based composition studies, the author describes how webtexts are collaboratively peer-reviewed in Kairos and authors are provided macro- and micro-level revision suggestions for their scholarly multimedia.

Composition studies has accepted a reductive view of dogma as an acritical commitment to received knowledge that precludes inquiry. As a result, composition gives short shrift to the role that basic beliefs play in any act of inquiry. But certain forms of humble dogma can and do serve as essential starting places for asking questions—even for skepticism and doubt. The writings of St. Augustine and Lesslie Newbigin exemplify such approaches to dogma and offer rhetorical educators a new terministic screen through which to value the role that beliefs play in inquiry.

This article draws on genre theory in a biliteracy context to analyze how one US–Mexico border-crossing graduate student used her genre knowledge and meta-knowledge in her first language, Spanish, as a resource for navigating disciplinary-based genres in her second language, English. The student's strategic use of her L1 genre meta-knowledge from non-university contexts to realize academic literacy tasks in her L2 represented a form of recontextualization, where meanings move and get re-shaped across contexts. This strategic negotiation, in turn, served to disrupt the notions of ‘novice’ and ‘expert’ that are prominent in the composition studies literature on second language writers, where students are seen to be moving on a linear trajectory from novice to expert status in academic writing. The article discusses implications for genre-based research and pedagogy for multilingual learners crossing linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries in their academic studies.

This article argues that historians of composition studies are burdened by adherence to history-as-narrative in archival research, whether supporting or countering master narratives of the field. I propose that historians redefine their work in conversation with the principles of archival ethnography, a concept from the field of library and information science. Reseeing historiography through this lens means privileging the position of the archivist as community interloper, thus creating a shift in responsibility from interpretation of archival material to public transmission thereof. Re-imagining the historian's role as ethnographic also aims to redress the ethical burden of inevitable re-presentation of past agents, practices, and values.

Evangelical-Christian graduate students negotiate identities that separate their religious and academic communities of practice. Drawing on bell hooks's notion that marginalized groups must speak for themselves, this essay argues that evangelical graduate students in composition studies must seek involvement in formal conversations on writing, through journal articles, presentations, and appropriate venues in ways that embody rather than restrain their evangelical identities. In order for these students to seek such involvement, it is imperative that graduate instructors begin a dialogue about the potential ways in which restraint impacts students in our efforts to acculturate them into composition.

Internalized racism is the belief by racialized individuals that derogatory messages about them are true. As such the individual becomes the agent of one’s own subjugation. Those who suffer from this type of self‐denigration and self‐hate must find a way to work through this psycho‐emotional experience. This project explores reflective writing as an open process to address the deep hurt of internalized racism. Reflective writing is an inherently expressed, multi‐voiced and reflective process that can empower individuals, giving them the tools, trust and power to facilitate their own healing on their own terms. Using the fields of narrative therapy and composition studies, four main benefits are discussed as they are synthesized and categorized from the relevant literature. In general, reflective writing addresses internalized racism by (1) externalizing the problem; (2) allowing the individual to re‐author one’s own story; (3) providing expressive space for working through emotions; and (4) facilitating t...

Simonton (2007) offered evidence for his Darwinian theory of creativity—blind nonmonotonic variation and selection—based on ratings of Picasso's preliminary sketches of the components for Guernica. This comment reexamines the sketches, adding two major sources of information: (a) consideration of the changing conceptions of the composition, as well as the components, and (b) inclusion of sketches from Picasso's first vision for his mural, the Studio sketches. Such analysis supports the notion of nonmonotonic variation including backtracking. It also suggests that the final mural, although radically different in its components from the Studio sketches, drew on the composition and theme of that initial vision for the mural, but in a completely reimagined form when a chance event pulled Picasso's thinking in a new direction. This comment also describes how Picasso drew on his expertise throughout his explorations, that lack of knowledge of outcome does not diminish the role of expertise in the artist at work...

This paper highlights the largely unacknowledged theoretical and pedagogical contributions of Austin Phelps, the accomplished nineteenth-century preacher and teacher of rhetoric, in two ways: First, it demonstrates that Phelps's methods of instruction depart from the documented trends in rhetorical education at American colleges during the mid-nineteenth century in that he endeavors to teach the sermon as a form of civic engagement. Second, it shows how Phelps's discussions of the unconscious in the process of composing and his insights into the role of emotion in the writing process anticipate aspects of the process movement in Composition Studies.

In recent years, scholars in rhetoric and composition studies have given increased attention to the various ways that rhetoric and religion intersect. To explore this relationship further, this article employs Kenneth Burke's dramatistic pentad and the methods of pentadic analysis proposed by Floyd Anderson and Lawrence Prelli in order to analyze two texts, Crowley's Toward a Civil Discourseand Obama's “Pentecost 2006 Keynote Address.” In our analysis, we aim to reveal the motives locked within Crowley's and Obama's texts to demonstrate how their attempts to open the universe of discourse—that is, to provide ways of bridging the divide between political liberals and religious conservatives—shut down the possibility for dialogue. We then offer counterstatements—what Anderson and Prelli refer to as “expressions of alternative orientations toward social reality” (90)—that may serve to open the universe of discourse.

In this essay I examine the problematics of mainstreaming within one site of composition studies research—the composition anthology. Specifically, I apply articulation theory and feminist disability theory to argue that the mainstreaming of disability narratives within composition readers, when articulated with a theory of individual subjectivity, legitimizes the belief that accommodation is an individualized process. Thus accommodation becomes synonymous with “fitting in,” a definition that locates the responsibility for adaptation within the “abnormal” body rather than within the institutions and ideologies that construct it as such.

I make the claim that even though style appears to be invisible in composition studies today, paradoxically, it is ubiquitous, and I examine areas where the study of style has diffused in the field, such as genre theory, rhetorical analysis, and personal writing. I both adopt and complicate Janice Lauer's notion of the “diaspora” as the site of style's migration in composition and argue that it is important to draw explicitly upon the field's rich stylistic resources for practical and pedagogical purposes.

As part of an argument in favour of using the five canons of classical rhetoric as a foundation for poetry-writing instruction, I discuss applications of the fifth canon, delivery. First, I summarise and discuss delivery in the rhetorical tradition, approaches to teaching delivery in composition studies and poetry's oral tradition. Then I analyse a student poem that was written primarily to be heard out loud. Finally, I offer 23 practical classroom applications of my research.

The difficulty of resolving the contradiction between personal and academic writing, experience and analysis, and local and global phenomena resides in deeper binary oppositions that continue to haunt us. Time and space, history and structure, are the larger frameworks in which we operate. Understanding the dialectical relationships of these coordinates illuminates the material and social processes of the production of culture, language, and history, suggesting a theoretical perspective based on a unity of opposites rather than their polarization. Through reflection on a course taught according to these principles, the author argues for a dialectical writing pedagogy.

This essay interrogates the dominant conception of natural ability in classical rhetoric, the necessary-but-not-sufficient theory of aptitude. It describes articulations of this commonplace, by Quintilian and Plato, and then specifically examines Isocrates' problematic affirmation and resistance to a highly determinant version of aptitude. This essay suggests that in the context of contemporary composition studies, Isocratic ambivalence may represent a productive strategy in order to reinvigorate dormant inquiries in language, human nature, and ethics, and to contest powerful attitudes and assumptions that currently champion the primacy of natural ability over experience.

Contrary to much recent scholarship, this essay argues that there is no such thing as a collaborative mode of literacy. Specifically, it takes issue with Andrea Lunsford and others who have called for a profound shift in the zeitgeist of composition studies, as though it were possible to transform students from competitive to collaborative writers. In a larger sense, though, the article is not about collaboration at all; rather, it uses the literature on collaborative writing to illustrate a certain kind of scholarly exaggeration, whereby composition reformers try too hard to distill practical lessons from interpretive categories.

In his essay “Disciplinary Identities: On the Rhetorical Paths between English and Communication Studies,”; Steven Mailloux notes that “many compositionists in the seventies and eighties did not find it necessary to claim to be a scientific discipline “(16). I respond to this claim by focusing on the new discourse about writing that emerged in the 1970s in work by Emig, Shaughnessy, Flower & Hayes, and others. Distinguishing between the “formative “ (intellectual) contexts from which this work drew, and the “receptive”; contexts in which it came to valued, used, and resonate, I show that whereas the roots of this work were almost exclusively empirical, their effects in the receptive context, including beyond the academy, were deeply rhetorical.

Although there has been much discussion in composition studies for the past several years about the importance of contact zones, dissensus, and conflict to the process of learning (Bizzell; Harris; Jarratt; Lu; Olson; Trimbur; West), there has been less talk of the relationship between "safe houses" and conflict, as well as the role anger plays in social and political engagement. Some composition scholars have argued that in order to help prepare students for participation in civic culture, it is necessary to articulate radical pedagogies, ones that encourage modes of argumentation and that see the tensions of social difference as points of political friction to be interrogated. In arguing for the necessity of agonistic pedagogical models, however, it is easy to overlook not only the affective relations of social and political engagement but also the fact that conflict and dissensus-precisely because of emotional ties and affective investments--o not always follow the proscriptions of reasoned or civil discourse, that engagement cannot always be understood in terms of prevailing rationalities and intelligibilities. In arguing for the importance of conflict (that ideological positions are forged and tested through argumentation rooted in social difference), it is also easy to ignore that sometimes we need to deal with some of the more damaging and long-lasting results of engagement: the effects of pain, violence, cruelty-psychic and emotional injury as well as physical

In the last few years, scholars have turned their attention to configuring narratives of rhetoric and composition studies’ disciplinary history. This essay advocates reading the field as a social formation whose move toward professionalization can be understood as a series of rhetorical negotiations. Using the local histories of two institutions that established doctoral programs in English Departments, I consider how local and material factors provide a more nuanced understanding of that field's evolution. This methodology highlights how the current state of a discipline is inextricably bound to the daily work of its members and offers a way to explore the social shapes of rhetoric yet to come.

Paul Butler's Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Studies in Composition and Rhetoric enters into several contentious conversations taking place in and around composition studies today. Ostensibly,...

Helen Rothschild Ewald's 1993 essay, "Waiting for Answerability: Bakhtin and Composition Studies," attempts to consolidate and redirect nearly a decade's appropriation of Bakhtin's work in composition studies. Its ambition to provide an authoritative map of and a new direction to Bakhtinian composition studies has been fulfilled in both its original place of publication and in its recent republication as the culminating essay in the first collection of "landmark" essays on Bakhtin, rhetoric, and writing (Farmer). While demonstrating the widespread use of Bakhtin in the field, Ewald characterizes this work as predominantly social-constructionist and heralds a new ethical emphasis that might be drawn from his earlier work on answerability. With heavy irony she deprecates how "handy" (332, 337) Bakhtin's work has been to a range of social-constructionist writers but chooses not to undertake a direct refutation of their claims. Instead, she chooses to suggest some teaching practices as part of a general reorientation of composition studies that would "focus on answerability" and examine "our specific situational responses to ethical issues that arise when we engage in writing or the teaching of writing" (345). Connecting with a crossdisciplinary revival of inquiry into ethical issues, Ewald's intervention could be taken to herald an important ethical turn in Bakhtinian composition studies. Ewald necessarily draws much of her account of Bakhtin's early themes of ethics and answerability, as she acknowledges, from Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Slavicists who have provided the most extensive and authoritative reading of Bakhtin to date and joined vigorously in the revival of ethical issues in literary criticism. Ewald shares not only their emphasis in Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics on the superior authenticity and ethical seriousness of Bakhtin's early work but also their impatience with readers of his work who have confined their interest to his socially oriented theories of dialogue and carnival. Like Morson and Emerson, she eschews refutation of these readers but identifies herself with a more serious and worthy future line of inquiry into "answerability in the ethical sense of individual accountability" as

Writing on the Margins by David Bartholomae provides a cornucopia of 21 empowering essays that have shaped composition studies. Presented in three parts, the collection of essays spans three areas:...

A case study of an experienced professor's comments on a design report in a first‐year engineering class was conducted over the period of an academic year. When compared with the commenting styles of technical writing teachers, the engineering professor's comments were found to be highly directive, and thus at odds with the preference for facilitative comments that prevails in composition studies. However, differences in genre conventions explain much of the discrepancy.

Since the 1960s, attitudes toward empirical research on writing, including research on technical/professional writing, have shifted from encouragement to resistance. This essay traces these shifts in light of changes in writing research, psychology, and the rhetoric of science. In composition studies, an initial mild uneasiness about “scientism”; intensified with the rise of process models, suggesting a Romanticist defense of the mystique of creativity. More recent post‐modernist denunciations of scientific methods as immoral have other Romanticist overtones. In technical communication, a long‐standing interest in workplace writing practices allowed a smoother integration of empirical analysis with descriptive studies of writing contexts. However, as in composition, recent critiques in technical communication suggest that empirical methods should not be employed. These critiques too tightly circumscribe the values that may be considered humanist and cut off important avenues of inquiry and critique that h...

In the past fifteen years, scholars in both composition and literature have called for a more integrated approach to reading and writing.1 The essays in the collection Composition and Literature: Bridging the Gap edited by Winifred Horner, for example, stressed the common interests of scholarship in these two domains. Similarly, the Modern Language Association recommended in a 1982 report that "MLA publications make deliberate efforts to stimulate thought and research about the interrelations of literature, composition, and rhetorical theory" (952). More recently, Peter Elbow has called for the end of "the war between reading and writing," arguing that "the primacy of reading in the reading/writing dichotomy is an act of locating authority away from the student and keeping it entirely in the teacher or institution or great figure" (17). Richard Lloyd-Jones and Andrea Lunsford have also emphasized the importance of an integrated approach to reading and writing in the curriculum, one that allows teachers to "foster student learning in reading, writing, interpreting, speaking, and listening" (316). Like Elbow, Lloyd-Jones and Lunsford insist that the integration of reading and writing not only enables students to become more active learners but also is critical for "educating students for participation in democracy" (85). But while an integrated approach to reading and writing is certainly a worthy goal, scholars in literary and composition studies differ on fundamental issues that may preclude (or at least complicate) our attempts to develop pedagogies that allow students to connect their own texts with other texts they encounter both inside and outside the classroom. One such issue involves the very nature of texts themselves-what texts are, how they are produced, and how we should read them. The assumptions, for example, about what it means to interpret a text diverge radically depending on whether the text is a student text or a literary text. As David Bartholomae observes: "The teacher who is unable to make sense out of a seemingly bizarre piece of student writing is often the same teacher who can give an elaborate explanation of the 'meaning' of a story by Donald Barthelme or a poem by e.e. cummings" (255). Instructors who interpret elements such as narrative leaps, obscure references, and twisted syntax as "errors" in student texts read the same elements in a literary work as

In her examination of Erasmus's "The Praise of Folly," Patricia Bizzell announces her wish to find a solution to the problem of "finding a compelling version of rhetorical authority from which to speak on behalf of oppressed groups in spite of the climate of post-modern skepticism which attempts to render all value assertions nugatory" (7-8).1 Bizzell understands the ultimate result of deconstruction-the tool that she and others in favor of a left-oriented political agenda have long used for the purpose of "criticizing received wisdom and destabilizing traditional foundations of belief, teaching us to regard all foundationalist assumptions with suspicion" (14)-to be Pyrrhonian skepticism, a nihilistic abyss of skepticism that refuses to regard even temporary truths. Pyrrhonian skepticism has forced Deconstruction to turn on the very scholars who have employed it to undermine foundationalist beliefs by always already undermining the left-oriented actions those scholars now wish to take. In the past, Bizzell has effectively critiqued foundationalist assumptions (e.g., "Foundationalism and Anti-Foundationalism in Composition Studies"), but now she says she is ready even to "play the fool" if she must to pursue "ways to engage in rhetorical processes whereby we use our common capacities to make reasonable judgments about experience in light of egalitarian values so that we may move more decisively toward democratic political action" (16). Since Bizzell is willing to "play the fool" for her pursuit, she might make an appeal to an older group of thinkers who have been misrepresented as fools more than once: the early Greek sophists, whom I believe offer a theoretical base to Bizzell and all of us who are interested in professing left-oriented values in our writing classrooms. To explicate that sophistic theoretical base, I will briefly review recent work on the sophists in composition and rhetoric, illustrate how a sophistic understanding of the progress of knowledge can enable us to avoid the trap of Pyrrhonian skepticism, and examine three neosophistic essays that organize the principles of neosophism. In the final section, I will use sample assignments I've designed for my own composition course to demonstrate how a neosophistic pedagogy authorizes sociopolitical action in the composition classroom. Bizzell, to her credit, connects her search for "rhetorical authority" to the work of the sophists. "Playing the fool," she says, allows one to "innocently transgress" social boundaries, an action that in turn, she hopes, allows teachers

No one in the history of philosophy and the history of rhetoric, not even the sophists, has been more abused than Socrates.1 The sophists were merely scorned and maligned.2 Socrates was quite eliminated, his voice appropriated by another.3 As a consequence, Socrates has traditionally been read as a mere point of origination of Platonic/Aristotelian philosophy and rhetoric, and both he and the so-called "Socratic method" have been sharply dismissed from contemporary rhetoric and composition studies. Vitanza, for example, characterizes Socratic dialogue as a search for generic concepts-concepts that can be "transferred to and acquired by another human being"-and describes Socratic pedagogy as "a series of questions [from a teacher] that force an interlocutor [a student] to always give the desired answers, thereby leading the interlocutor to arrive at the predetermined conclusion to the inquiry" (162, 166). Sosnoski, deploring the teacher/student relationship implied by such a pedagogy, says simply "Socrates Begone!" from the rhetoric and composition classroom (198). Nonetheless, Socrates has enjoyed a revival in contemporary scholarship, most strikingly in the works of Jacques Derrida and Mikhail Bakhtin but also in the works of numerous contemporary historians and philosophers.4 This revival has potential interest for rhetoric and composition studies, for it reveals a Socrates different from the one handed down through the Western tradition: a Socrates who speaks and listens to many voices, not just one; who is more concerned with living than he is with knowing; whose "rhetoric" is a means of testing people and ideas rather than a means of imposing his ideas upon others.5 Derrida's dramatic portrait of Socrates writing is at once a characterization of the traditional way of reading Socrates and an invitation to imagine a different Socrates. Bakhtin's Socrates is a more detailed sketch of what such a different Socrates might be. This different Socrates is a figure with many voices, a central figure in Bakhtin's dialogism, which has brought these many voices to contemporary rhetoric and composition studies.6 This Socrates is also the less familiar figure who lives in Bakhtin's carnivalesque world of everyday experience. Finally, he is a figure with links to the rhetorical tradition, the figure who appears in the early Platonic dialogues, whose rhetoric is a means of testing people and ideas, not a means of persuading others to accept his ideas, thus imposing his ideas upon them. This Socrates has potential interest as an

Students benefit from a collaborative learning situation by taking greater responsibility for their education, broadening their perspectives, and improving their skills in academic and social interactions. Libraries bring together students from all disciplines and are a natural center for interaction. Librarians who employ collaborative learning techniques in their bibliographic instruction sessions may benefit from a better understanding of current research and theoretical discussions, much of which is taking place in composition studies. Collaborative learning and a social constructionist theory of knowledge should prompt us to reexamine our teaching methods as well as out associations with other faculty.

in the student's hands, Elbow's approach to the teaching of writing appears to be revolutionary and freeing. Using such techniques as freewriting, open-ended writing, and other forms of private writing, Elbow encourages students to tap their own experience as a source for their writing and elevates the student's own resources over those of the academic community. Elbow's focus on the psychological and physical drives of the writer, the desire to be loved (Sharing and Responding) and the "compulsion to write" (Embracing 73), makes writing something that the teacher can share, but apparently not control or appropriate. Recently, however, composition theorists have been critical of the conservative political implications of Elbow's pedagogy, arguing that Elbow's rhetoric, defined variously as "Romantic expressivism" or "expressionistic," fails to empower students to effect change through language. These critics argue that Elbow's theory "hides the social nature of language" (Faigley 531) and teaches students how to "to assert a private vision, a vision which, despite its uniqueness, finally represents humankind's best nature" (Berlin 487). Notably though, those who criticize Elbow for being antisocial focus only on what Elbow has to say about writers and writing. In doing so, they overlook what Elbow has to say about the most social aspect of writing-the role of the reader and the exchange between writer and reader. In this essay I will examine Elbow's rhetoric of reading in order to suggest that these taxonomic critiques oversimplify his theoretical and pedagogical position within the field of composition studies. In fact, a closer examination of Elbow's rhetoric of reading reveals that the problem is not so much that he ignores the social, it's that he tries to control it. Like those who criticize him, Elbow would like to help students to demystify the social processes of the Academy, to balance the power between writer and reader within the social space of the composition classroom. In his attempt to control the transaction between writer and reader, however, Elbow reproduces the same hierarchy he wishes to dismantle. I will suggest, nonetheless, that there is a means by which the more liberating aspects of Elbow's rhetoric of reading might be kept intact.

Last year, I was invited to speak at a conference whose theme was the feminization of composition.2 This topic coincided with another discussion I had been following in our journals: the emergence of Rhetoric and Composition as a scholarly field. In preparing my talk, I began to raise several questions like: What is meant by feminization in these discussions? Can we assume that composition is feminized? Are the discourses on disciplinary formation and on feminization already woven together? If not, should they be? This essay explores these questions, making distinctions and telling stories that offer an alternative perspective. Let me begin with the feminization of composition. My rereading of many of these discussions3 leads me to conclude that their statements about feminization apply largely to composition instruction, not to Rhetoric and Composition as a scholarly field.4 The two reasons generally advanced are the numerical predominance of women and the nature of composition pedagogy. Accounts agree that women do most of the teaching of writing from the university level to elementary school as either full- or part-time instructors. Many descriptions of recent pedagogies maintain that instructional practices, particularly of expressive and critical pedagogies, are marks of feminization because they are collaborative, student centered, and nurturing. A few, however, dissent. Susan Jarratt and Evelyn Ashton-Jones, for example, problematize collaboration as a desirable feminine pedagogy. Lil Brannon contends that the expressivists and people like Giroux, Shor, Freire, and Rose are reinscribing patriarchy by invoking masculine heroic narratives of conquest as traditional male Romantic heroes who, like the rugged individual in the Dead Poet's Society, work against all odds to make a difference. Some historical accounts of nineteenth-century composition position it as feminized in contrast to rhetorical instruction and the emerging professionalization of English Studies. Robert Connors argues that the demise of agonistic rhetorical instruction in persuasive public discourse, which he contends had largely characterized male education up through 1850, was related to the entrance of significant numbers of women into higher education in the nineteenth century. These women were excluded from taking oral rhetoric and assigned to a more "appropriate" course called composition. He

Over the last thirty-four years, since her earliest publication on composing in 1960, Janet Emig has been a formidable presence in composition studies. Her first monograph, The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, a slight, 151-page NCTE research report, which was published without fanfare in 1971 and sold at the time for under five dollars, remains her work with which we are most familiar. Stephen North calls it "arguably . . . the single most influential piece of Researcher inquiry-and maybe any kind of inquiry-in Composition's short history" (197). The contributions of The Composing Processes range from encouraging a change in attitudes toward writing processes to more specific understandings of the nature of these processes, from a greater respect for research in composition to specific techniques for accomplishing that research. The Composing Processes remains an important historical document. Before its publication there had been few attempts to describe the actual writing processes of adolescents. Following James Moffett's Teaching the Universe of Discourse (1968), The Composing Processes popularized the so-called "process" approach to writing instruction, adding significantly to the momentum of examining the production of written texts, not just the texts themselves. Perhaps its most enduring legacy, however, is its pluralizing of our notions of a monolithic composing "process." By introducing the field to case study and composingaloud research methods, Emig motivated subsequent researchers to examine more closely the cognitive activities of writers, thereby bringing into question any easy descriptions of how human beings write. Much of what Emig introduced to the field in that monograph has been revised and improved upon by later scholarship, not the least of which being Emig's own. Yet the notion that "the composing process" is actually multiple processes and sub-processes, influenced by innumerable factors of context, personality, cognitive development, and so on, remains an idea central to composition theory. Despite these obvious contributions, The Composing Processes has been much criticized for imperfections and perceived imperfections. Emig and her monograph have been variously accused of bad research, misrepresentation, overgeneralization, insensitivity, and bad manners. Our typical way of

Whatever dates Composition historians suggest as the beginning of modern composition studies whether it's 1949-50 with the founding of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, or 1961 with the publication of Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer's Research in Written Composition, or 1971 with the publication of Janet Emig's The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders they all agree that the modern study of written communication is at least two decades old, with its gradual emergence occurring over a decade or so. One way of marking the emergence of this new discipline is to look for the rise of what Robert Connors has called "a coherently evolved theory" of composition (Introduction xii). In fact, the journal literature of the 1950s and early 1960s is full of suggestions for a theoretical foundation for the study and teaching of writing. Finding a coherent theory that the field could embrace, however, was problematic.