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Several major problems with peer review exist in the related humanities disciplines of rhetoric, communication, and composition studies: a preponderance of incompetent reviewers, a lack of constructive criticism and the maintenance of orthodoxy, relative ease in identifying blinded authors, editorial passivity, and long waits to receive reviews. We propose five solutions: training for reviewers and editors, reviewers signing their reviews, payment for reviewers, thirty-day review turnaround, and guidelines for reviewing promoted by collective action. Before such solutions could be implemented, however, the existing problems must be acknowledged.

Although composition scholars have long advocated for working-class and under-represented populations on campus, the emergence of “first-generation college” as a marker of difference in public, administrative, and scholarly discourses invites further consideration of how we theorize this marker. As a bureaucratic marker (originating in higher education administration) that exhibits potential for organizing students for self-advocacy across difference, “first-generation college” warrants particular attention from scholars interested in the intersections between literacy studies and rhetoric. This article initiates a conversation about FGC as a marker of difference, observing that the bureaucratic and rhetorical nature of “first-generation college” as a marker necessitates a constitutive rhetorical approach to the term, an investigation of how the use of the term articulates a literate positionality, situates it within local and cultural narratives, and assigns it value. Placing composition scholarship in conversation with interviews with 17 first-generation college and low-income students and alumni of a large state university, this article reads first-generation college literate positionality in light of students’ own use of the identifier and within the context of their accounts of navigating class difference in college.

This teaching practice presents a classroom exercise completed in a first-year composition class at an English-medium private university in Lithuania. The course typically takes place in the second semester of the year and is required for all first-year students, who are multilingual but completing their university degree in English. The instructor, a US speaker of English who has a background in US composition studies, leads the exercise that consists of a writing style analysis that examines sentence length, word variety, and sentence emphasis, concluding with a discussion of how students can adapt their writing style to meet the needs of a new audience. The exercise aims to help students understand their writing style and what they need to know to adapt their style to fit the academic writing context in the university.

Debates over academic writing as a new discipline, or rather trend, started in the jour­nal seven years ago and initially involved academics from different fields. However, when the focus shifted towards teaching writing in English, the discussion narrowed and lost its urge. The analysis of the first papers shows that the importance of developing academic writing skills is understood by the Russian academic community, but most academics have limited awareness of academic writing as a discipline and field of research aimed at solving major problems in education and science. The paper focuses on the theoretical and methodological issues of academic writing and gives a brief overview of how it emerged into a well-developed discipline in Western, mostly US, universities. To achieve the goal of introducing academic writing into the higher education, Russian academics need to collaborate and get involved into multilateral action and interdisciplinary research. The paper concludes that disciplinary divides can be overcome through developing theoretical and conceptual issues of academic writing as rhetoric and composition studies.

User-centered design (UCD) as a concept has begun to enter composition studies, particularly through scholar-teachers of technical communication. We question further incorporation—specifically, the collision course of industry-driven language such as “efficiency” and “expediency” and the potential positioning of students as “users” in the composition classroom. We argue that this positioning places us in unproductive opposition to multimodal composition. Rather than a wholesale incorporation of UCD into the composition classroom, we outline a “theory + play” approach that combines scholarship in rhetoric, speculative design, and multimodal composition. This approach, we argue, better aligns with the political and social investments of Johnson’s (1998) theory of user-centered technology, in which our students are critical makers and engaged citizens in the public sphere.

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...

The past twenty years have witnessed a significant and sustained global turn in American higher education, with many US colleges and universities pursuing curricular and institutional programs that prepare students for lives of global engagement. Many institutions have redefined their civic and ethical institutional goals to foster not only national citizenship but global citizenship. While global education has consistently been attacked by the right for many years, the scope and virulence of attacks on global higher education have been amplified in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential campaign and following the election of Donald Trump. Portrayals of global education as a global conspiracy have circulated across a range of fake-news, alt-right, and hard right publications, as have calls for nationalist visions of civic education that instill an appreciation for American exceptionalism. This article maps out how global higher education is constructed in the populist rhetoric of the political right, both in accounts from fake news sources and hard right news sources and in the educational policy discourse of conservative organizations like the National Association of Scholars. It then explores the consequences of anti-global education rhetoric for the global turn in rhetoric and composition studies and maps out both a critical and political response.

Rhetoric and composition studies have conceptualized and defined digital sampling as a method of composition in many ways and for various pedagogical purposes: from a means of free-play invention that is critical of more formalistic writing practices to a semiotic strategy rooted in African American rhetorical traditions designed to effect political change. The latter view is critical of the former in that the former does not account for student digital sampling projects that unquestioningly appropriate from other people and communities. This is a real pedagogical problem, but students can create unethical and hurtful digital sampling projects, no matter the assignment prompt. To supplement such free-play invention strategies and anticipate problematic student projects, this essay suggests to view digital sampling through a rhetorical ethics of care perspective and offers a pedagogical heuristic for ethical in(ter)vention through the concept of vulnerability. Considering digital sampling through a heuristic of vulnerability entails a questioning of all sampling practices as potential acts of wounding or caring in the hopes of helping students develop into more sophisticated rhetors capable of producing nuanced compositions and engaging with ethical issues of digital media.

This chapter explores a digital cultural rhetoric framework for rhetoric and composition studies. It provides a working definition for digital cultural rhetorics, outlines some foundational values of digital cultural rhetorics scholarship, and demonstrates what those values look like in practice. Digital rhetoric is the digital negotiation of information—and its historical, social, economic, and political contexts and influences—to affect change. Many digital cultural rhetorics scholars have responded with research methodologies informed by complex models and logics of technological development from underrepresented and/or underserved communities of digital practice. Digital cultural rhetorics scholars are also invested in studying how bodies matter to teaching writing with technology. Digital cultural rhetorics scholarship is typically situated in specific cultures with diverse rhetorical skill, communities of practice, technological expertise, and capacity for social change. Effectively queering neurotypical representations of autism, disability rhetorics scholars also contribute to intersectional mind-body politics with and through technology.

This chapter responds to the troubling formation of global higher education and international education examined in the previous chapter by mapping out resistant forms of transnational rhetorical education and rhetorical citizenship. Synthesizing a wide range of rhetorical scholarship from communication and rhetoric and composition studies, this chapter presents a unified vision of the rhetorical capacities of inquiry and performance that can enable students to critically perceive opportunities for transnational critique and engagement, and the rhetorical ethics that can equip students to critically respond to the material and symbolic conditions that produce relationships of interdependency, conflict, and precarity.

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.

This chapter draws parallels between superhero revision and revision within composition theory. After examining Ezra Pound’s infamous revisions of Eliot’s The Waste Land, several key stages in the conceptualization of revision will be explored, from Aristotelian rhetoric’s lasting and influential notion of revision as error, to Donald Murray and other early Expressivists’ sense of revision as an act of creative discovery and its influence on early process writing, to the post-process critique of process writing’s failure to account for the contingent and constructed nature of revision as a social practice. This critique leads to speculations regarding what the practice of textual revision can look like in the wake of the shift away from revision as part of the writing process towards a view of revision as a stance of resisting or negotiating identity positions relative to cultural and institutional authority.

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.

Theories of authorship and models of the author have been influential in shaping various approaches to composition theory and pedagogy. While discussions of the role of the author and authorship in composition studies have been going on for some time, tensions be- t ween the theoretical (author as social construct) and practical (author as agent) dimensions of authorship remain unresolved. Presenting the findings of a qualitative study of undergraduate writers at The City University of New York, this article explores student perspectives on models of authorship, the relationships between these models and student experiences of authorship in different writing situations, and proposes the importance of distinguishing between the multiple models and definitions of authorship and the rhetorical contexts associated with each. KE YWORDS: authorship, authorships, Romantic author, authorial construction, audience construction, students, writers, authors

This review essay places Local Histories in the context of recent books and studies examining the wide variety of composition and rhetoric courses and pedagogical practices that existed in nineteenth-century America. The book has two general foci as represented in its split title: Local Histories , or microhistories of institutions, curricula, and figures; and Reading the Archives of Composition, an extended look at several hitherto unexamined archival sources and their associated projects. The editors identify three central purposes for their book: to challenge the “Harvard narrative,” which, they claim, places the origin of “composition” at Harvard and other elite Eastern colleges; to offer several alternative “microhistories” from various institutional sites, and to document, interpret, and interrogate specific archival holdings and the nature of archival work in composition. While the reviewers find the challenges to “the Harvard model” as history and historiography overstated, overall, they find the collection important for its studies of diverse sites and its attention to less visible figures: teachers who acted as early innovators, and students whose written compositions, informal diaries and letters offer new lenses for making history. The authors of various chapters who unveil their documentary and archival work in process, disclosing both finds and gaps and offering their developing understandings of the archive as construct, perform a valuable service to future scholars of composition studies.

ACCORDING TO THE CONVENTIONAL NARRATIVE, Composition Studies evolved as a discipline through a series of paradigm shifts over the past forty or fifty years. Under the mode of "current-traditional rhetoric" which prevailed into the 1960s, writing instruction was chiefly a matter of correcting grammar and mastering rhetorical conventions. Beginning in the late 1960s, with the rejection of institutional authority characterizing much social movement of that decade, the focus of writing instruction shifted toward the student writer as a person: through attention to the writing process over the written product, the discovery and cultivation of the writer's self or voice through written expression would help liberate her from the authority of rules and conventions (grammatical, rhetorical, and by implication social). Such a mission grew increasingly important as open admissions policies of the 1970s increased the ranks of non-traditional and less-well-prepared students in university classrooms. By the early 1980s, however, composition scholars grew critical of this once progressive expressivist or process-oriented paradigm. Notions of the writer finding her individual voice as a means of asserting the self's autonomy seemed naive in the face of social realities. Student writers came to be seen as much if not more constructed by various authorizing voices than by their own voices. Thus, postprocess pedagogics sought to help students to recognize the social, cultural, and institutional situatedness of their writing. There are close and distant parallels to be drawn, I think, between this disciplinary narrative and those that could be constructed for other areas of language, literature, and literacy studies: English, Creative Writing, Literary Theory, Linguistics, Communications, and so on. For example, current traditional approaches to composition clearly have a parallel in New Critical approaches to literature By contrast, so-called Language Poetry as it emerged in the academy in the 1980s presented a critique of individual voice and expression and the workshop model of confessional narrative poetry at the heart of much Creative Writing pedagogy. Language Poetry also paralleled the rise of theory in English departments: while historically coterminous with the ascendancy of expressivist pedagogy in the 1970s and 1980s, theory likewise challenged the very notions of a cohesive self independent of social forces that seemed so central to voicist rhetoric and metaphors in composition. Such parallels and intersections between and within the disciplines can be most productively considered when they help us understand and contextualize our work in new ways. And so, to the question of the role voice and voice metaphors can and should play in composition studies and pedagogy, this essay proposes a new perspective, one from a neglected and therefore perhaps surprising creative writing subgenre text-sound poetry. Emerging in part from 1960s avant-garde efforts in multimedia and musical composition, text-sound poetry features recordings of spoken text that can then be subject to manipulation or collaging with other sounds, images, etc. I will consider here recorded excerpts of three different text-sound pieces. "Come to Free the Words" was first executed in 1962 by Brien Gysin, with whose work Caroline Bergvall has recently engaged, recording her own version of "Come to Free the Words" as well as a new piece in direct response to it. As I will show, these three text-sound works (CD tracks 11, 12, and 13) offer useful insights into the efficacy of "voice" in thinking about and teaching writing: between process and postprocess, between academic voice and the student's attempt to master it, Bergvall's work envisions a "subvoicive" third way. Before considering her work, I want to flesh out the terms and stakes of this debate a bit further, starting with one possible implication in the disciplinary history sketched above, namely that Composition Studies, having moved through its current traditional and process-oriented modes, now operates in a fully postprocess mode In fact, nothing could be further from the case. …

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.

This book introduces a new trend in curriculum design and it is based on a novel concept of ‘text’, which is adopted from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). SFL defines ‘text’ as ‘naturally occurring language use with social functions’ (Hasan, 2014, p.7). Although text occurs in space and time, it is not in the boundary of spatio-temporal dimensions per se. Its importance lies in its function for social practices, where language and action intertwine with each other to accomplish a specific type of social activity (Hasan, 2014). Besides, text is the initial stage in linguistic system, where different forms of language realises (Halliday, 1991; Hasan, 2014). Peter deploys this concept in proposing a curriculum design which is also in close affinity with the notion of genre in North American composition studies, New Rhetoric (NR). The NR holds that the emergence of genre is the result of repeated social actions in particular situations which in turn ends in specific form and content (Bazerman, 1988, Devitt, 2004; Miller, 1984). Freedman and Medway (1994) support that NR genre theorists aim to unite linguistic similarities to the domain of human activities which take place regularly. Paltridge (2001) also states that genre studies in the NR put emphasis on the relationship between text, context, and the actions that genres fulfil within particular contexts. My understanding is that such a notion of genre is compatible with SFL notion of text for social practices, whereby the discourse types are intertwined to a wider socio-cultural understanding of language in use.

In this piece of critical, interdisciplinary and situated legal scholarship the author explores the implications of the material practices and institutional constraints that shape the place of Legal Writing and its professoriate in contemporary US legal education, and draws lessons from both the history of Rhetoric and Composition Studies and that of US legal education in seeking ways to address the gendered employment discrimination characteristically experienced by teachers of Legal Writing.

Distance education (DE) programs at many universities have been initiated to generate new efficiencies for the academic process, particularly cost efficiency and pedagogical efficiency. In writing studies, this move toward digitally mediated instruction has, in some classrooms, recreated practices that resonate with the pedagogy that resulted from Current-Traditional Rhetoric (CTR). Thus, a trace of distance education's and composition studies’ parallel narratives demonstrates that writing studies has already addressed some of the questions (and concerns) that online writing instruction raises. By specifically focusing on the tensions created by negotiating cost efficiencies and pedagogical efficiencies with communication efficiencies and medium efficiencies, we interrogate current administrative decisions as well their pedagogical outcomes. We conclude by proposing strategies for rearticulating future narratives about online writing instruction in potentially productive ways.

Understanding Teaching and Interpretation in Literature and Composition-Rhetoric McDonald, Christina Russell, and Robert L. McDonald, eds. 2002. Teaching Writing: Landmarks and Horizons. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. $25.00 sc. xv + 301 pp.Olson, Gary A., and Lynn Worsham, eds. 2003. Critical Intellectuals on Writing. Albany: SUNY Press. $54.50 hc.$17.95 sc. 209 pp.Tokarczyk, Michelle M., and Irene Papoulis, eds. 2003. Teaching Composition/Teaching Literature: Crossing Great Divides. New York: Peter Lang Publishers. $29.95 sc. 170 pp.TuSmith, Bonnie, and Maureen T. Reddy, eds. 2002. Race in the College Classroom: Pedagogy and Politics. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. $60.00 hc. $22.00 sc. x + 326 pp.Winifred Bryan Horner noted in the introduction to her 1983 collection Composition and Literature a concern with what she called the "widening gulf between research and teaching in literature and research and teaching in composition" (1983, 1). She went on to describe the book as "an attempt to uncover fresh and exciting opportunities within our profession" (8) by understanding synergies between the two fields. Following Horner, as a composition-rhetoric scholar with a background in literary studies, I also hope to better mobilize together the strengths and limitations of these two area of English studies. Thus, in this review essay, I show how four quite distinct collections-all addressing literacy, writing, and pedagogy in different ways-each has something to contribute to both literature and composition, and towards that end, I focus on reading each collection through the perspective of connecting the two fields of study. These books illustrate one of the most compelling similarities between literature and composition studies: their commitment to introducing postsecondary students to new-and increasingly complex-literacy practices.Taking this shared commitment to postsecondary literacy education as a foundation, I engage these four collections with an eye towards forging stronger connections between the two fields and towards better understanding teaching practices in English studies. I conclude by suggesting some further directions for research suggested by the work presented in these collections, particularly in coming to understand how a mutually beneficial relationship between teaching and scholarship can be cultivated across disciplinary borders.Michelle Tokarczyk and Irene Papoulis's Teaching Composition/Teaching Literature: Crossing Great Divides picks up Homer's debate twenty years after her collection was published, as they explicitly engage the productive (and not-so-productive) tensions among composition and literature within English departments. Christina Russell McDonald and Robert L. McDonald's Teaching Writing: Landmarks and Horizons traces the trajectory of composition-rhetoric's attention to teaching writing, while Race in the College Classroom, edited by Bonnie TuSmith and Maureen Reddy, addresses issues of race and racial identity within institutional and classroom spaces. Finally, through interviews with prolific writers and intellectuals, Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham's Critical Intellectuals on Writing illustrates some of the very particular ways that scholarship and writing are intertwined.I organize the review by first situating the composition/literature divide through my discussion of Tokarczyk and Papoulis's collection; then, after locating the three remaining books in their respective scholarly contexts, I show how each of them also bridges composition and literature teaching. I pair McDonald and McDonald with TuSmith and Reddy because each provides a window into the kind of attention currently being given to pedagogical issues within English studies, as McDonald and McDonald focus on writing classrooms, while TuSmith and Reddy situate their work in a more general classroom space. Finally, I suggest that the interviews compiled by Olson & Worsham can act as pedagogical models for budding intellectuals. …

While the term post-process can be useful as a heuristic for expanding the scope of the field of second language writing, the uncritical adoption of this and other keywords can have serious consequences because they often oversimplify the historical complexity of the intellectual developments they describe. In order to provide a critical understanding of the term post-process in its own historical context, this article examines the history of process and post-process in composition studies, focusing on the ways in which terms such as current-traditional rhetoric , process , and post-process have contributed to the discursive construction of reality. Based on this analysis, I argue that the use of the term post-process in the context of L2 writing needs to be guided by a critical awareness of the discursive construction process. I further argue that the notion of post-process needs to be understood not as the rejection of process but as the recognition of the multiplicity of L2 writing theories and pedagogies.

The term discourse analysis has been used interchangeably in two separate contexts — spoken discourse (i.e., multiple-source dialogic) and written discourse (i.e., single-source monologic). Such a distinction, however, oversimplifies the situation; while there are obvious overlaps between the two, to some extent each has evolved in its own direction. Written discourse analysis, the subject of our discussion, is obviously closely connected with work in literacy, but it implicates a great heterogeneity of topics and approaches, including at least some from psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. Discourse analysis, in the sense in which we are using it, emerged in the early 1970s. A modern history of written discourse analysis is perhaps best covered within a 40–50-year time span. In the course of that time, a number of new and emerging disciplines and research fields have contributed to systematic analyses of the linguistic features and patterns occurring in written texts. At the same time, other continuing disciplines have provided contributions that have been important and are ongoing. It should be fairly evident that any attempt to cover such a broad spectrum of views and disciplines would not be appropriate in a single article. We therefore intend to limit the scope of this paper to analyses of written discourse that explore the actual structuring of the text via some consistent framework. Our goal is to highlight and describe historically the various efforts to find the structures and linguistic patterns in texts that contribute to how they are understood, interpreted, and used. It seems to us that, in order to comprehend what has happened in the context of L2 writing research, it is necessary to understand the extensive work that has been done in discourse analysis.

All reference bibliographies are "little systems," to quote Tennyson?exercises in classification. They require circumscribing a subject by defining what will be included and excluded. The categories used not only must accommodate every work falling within the scope of the bibliography but also must anticipate how people will consult it. The MLA International Bibliography's new composi tion and rhetoric section represents an interesting case study of the influences and expectations that shape such classification systems. This essay explores briefly the principles that helped shape the new section and that reflect how composition studies has come to define itself over the past twenty-eight years. The classification system for the new composition and rhetoric section was devised on 30 November 1999, in the conference room of the old MLA headquarters on Astor Place in New York City. Those present were Terence Ford, then editor of the MLA International Bibliography, Phyllis Franklin; Gail Hawisher; Jacqueline Jones Royster; James Sosnoski; Todd Taylor; and 1.1 marked the moment because it seemed typical of what would hap pen if you put a group of composition teachers into a conference room for two days. After a mil day of discussing different ways of viewing the field, someone suggested that each of us make a list of essential categories that a bibliography of composition and rhetoric should include. The lists were remarkably similar. When we had finished discussing them, we reached

As a WPA and a service-learning director and practitioner, the author suggests connections between food studies, rhetoric and composition studies, and critical service-learning theory that involve mobilizing students to join in or help lead community efforts surrounding the local, organic food movement, food justice, and food literacy. The study is framed by questions of how composition instructors can create courses around issues related to the global food crisis to embed students in community-centered food literacy initiatives, and, more generally, how practitioners and WPAs can effectively promote and explain community-engaged pedagogies to higher-level administrators who question the value of the practice. I recently had a conversation with a dean at the University of Colorado Boulder about why the Program for Writing and Rhetoric made a curricular commitment to service- learning and civic engagement throughout its lower- and upper-division courses. More specifically, he wanted to understand the benefits of service-learning for students. He was not interested in assessment data about personal growth and civic learning. That students become more engaged and "critical citizens for a participatory democracy" (Berlin 97), as has been shown in numerous large and small-scale assessment studies (Ash, Clayton, and Atkinson; Astin and Sax; Eyler and Giles; Eyler, Giles, Stenson, and Gray), did not particularly impress him. "Yes," he said, "but is there something about service-learning that teaches students more effectively how to think and write?" As some within Rhetoric and Composition Studies argue to move beyond Paula Mathieu's "public turn" to a "political turn" 1 —one that would focus more deliberately on political issues than the social turn of the 1990s—practitioners, scholars, and WPAs once again face a host of questions that get at the heart of why we teach and what higher education's purposes are and should be. This is nothing new. These conversations have persisted through the last century from John Dewey to Paulo Freire to Ernest Boyer. In Rhetoric and Composition specifically, binary viewpoints about how to teach and the purposes for rhetoric and composition classes incite emotional and compelling arguments. In one camp, for example, are critical literacy scholars such as Henry Giroux and Ira Shor, who argue that critical pedagogy is an "emancipatory" project of "transformative intellectuals" (Giroux 174-175). Critical pedagogue James Berlin declares, "the objectives of English Studies are many. The most significant of these is developing a measure of facility in reading and writing practices so as to prepare

Bell, Derrick. Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. New York: Basic-Harper, 1992. Berlin, James A. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies. Urbana: NCTE, 1996. . Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984. Bowen, William G., and Derek Bok. The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998. Brereton, John C., ed. The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875-1925: A Documentary History. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995. Enos, Theresa. Gender Roles and Faculty Lives in Rhetoric and Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. Gebhardt, Richard C., and Barbara Genelle Smith Gebhardt, eds. Academic Advancement in Composition Studies: Scholarship, Publication, Promotion, Tenure. Mahwah: Erlbaum, 1997. Johnson, Nan. Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. Kitzhaber, Albert R. Rhetoric in American Colleges, 18501900. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1990. Lunsford, Andrea, Helene Moglen, and James F. Slevin, eds. The Future of Doctoral Studies in English. New York: MLA, 1989. McKay, Nellie Y. "Naming the Problem that Led to the Question 'Who Shall Teach African American Literature?'; or, Are We Ready to Disband the Wheatley Court?" PMLA 113 (1998): 359-69. Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. MLA Committee on Professional Employment. Evaluating the Mission, Size, and Composition of Your Doctoral Programs. New York: MLA, 1997. . Final Report. New York: MLA, 1997. Murphy, James J., ed. A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Twentieth-Century America. Davis: Hermagoras, 1990. North, Stephen M. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Upper Montclair: Boynton, 1987. Russell, David R. Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 1870-1990: A Curricular History. Carbondale: Southem Illinois UP, 1991.

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